


eijun niyoru fukuinsho

by magicmau5



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball, ダイヤのA | Daiya no A | Ace of Diamond
Genre: Alternate Universe - BDSM, Alternate Universe - Crack, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Anal Sex, Beta Wanted, Bullying, Comedy, Crack Crossover, Crack Relationships, Crack Treated Seriously, Diary/Journal, Dream Sex, Eventual Smut, Everybody Wants Sawamura, Everyone Is Gay, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, FML, Freudian Elements, I Made Myself Cry, I Tried, I Will Go Down With This Ship, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, I taught myself html so I could add pics, I'm Bad At Titles, Inspired by Fanfiction, Inspired by Music, Inspired by Novel, Inspired by Poetry, Inspired by Real Events, Inspired by a Movie, Japanese Culture, Japanese Mythology & Folklore, Japanese Rope Bondage, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Masturbation, My First AO3 Post, My First Fanfic, My First Work in This Fandom, Native American Character(s), Not Beta Read, Original Character(s), Pictures, Playlist, Psychological Thriller, Run-On Sentences, Sarcasm, Sarcastic Kanemaru Shinji, Sarcastic Sawamura Eijun, Sawamura turns everyone gay, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Song Lyrics, Switch Kanemaru Shinji, Switch Sawamura Eijun, Symbolism, Texting, Thriller, Twitter, Very Secret Diary, WTF, Wet Dream, What Have I Done, What Was I Thinking?, Why Did I Write This?, and a lovely Spotify playlist yay, and eventually, as filling as cracktucky fried chicken served with a side of cheesy crackotatoes, balls of crack will go flying so thank you for reading, i'm used to Adult Fan Fiction, mixed with enough crack to get Paris Hilton through the next ice age, oh I almost forgot it's got tons of, plus some, plz be my beta this is ridic, this is a crack cocktail
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-22
Updated: 2016-06-29
Packaged: 2018-05-15 12:31:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 10
Words: 50,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5785432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magicmau5/pseuds/magicmau5
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>栄純に依る福音書 / eijun niyoru fukuinsho / the gospel according to Eijun (TGATE) is a crack psychological thriller/romcom mostly written in a kōkan enikki/illustrated collaborative journal between Kanemaru and Sawamura. Main ship is KaneSawa but I enjoy unrequited drama, so this parodies most ships known to mankind. Full kurobas crossover begins ch 8. If you like going down rabbit holes and through mirrors multiple times this is written with you in mind. If Jorge Luis Borges and Yuji Terajima wrote the plot of Daiya together, this is what it would look like, just a lot more gay. The whole thing is one cheesy ball of crack spinning in a trajectory off to a moon made of crackcheese.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. kōkan nikki

**Author's Note:**

> A few important things:  
> I cut the riddle list out. If you still want to unravel the mystery of Crackesawa, basically you need to solve these:  
> Riddle me this, riddle me that,  
> What kind of twins are afraid of the dark,  
> skins aglow with a single bright spark?  
> What Janus monsters have stolen your eyes,  
> see and hear all except for your cries?  
> What theory holds nothing but sand,  
> awake but thoughtless in a dead land?
> 
> I changed the OTP/pairs so that there's more kurobas/daiya crossover in terms of the lovey-dovey stuff.
> 
> This has changed a bit in the style and purpose I originally planned for. As far as genre, I suppose it's more of a psychological thriller with elements of humor and cheesy romance. But nearly every chapter will be a metamorphosis of the previous, just as all fanfiction are the metamorphoses of original works.
> 
> If a narrator says something like "true in every poem universe," it means that particular story-inside-a-story is based on true events that happened in our "reality." I'm really into metaphysics so you might see some of that reflected in this fic. 
> 
> A glossary of any Japanese stuff you might be unfamiliar with is provided at the end of each chapter if necessary. I'm not Japanese so if I have something totally wrong PLEASE TELL ME; native speakers' concrit would be super helpful. My tortoise shell is tough! (See ch 4).
> 
> I've only written original fics before so please be patient with me since I'm a complete newb. Concrit is the food of the gods. If you want to say anything at all, no worries because it's all interesting and helpful. I am always open to new ideas. (ಡ∀ಡ)ゞ
> 
> Umm if you hate cursing and OOC, chapter 6 will explain(ish) and teach you the wisdom of magicmau5. (*≧▽≦)ﾉｼ))
> 
> Final note on an OC:
> 
> Okay so there's a real person like Corey that I grew up with, played both basketball and baseball with (him: silent badass, me: pathetic baka without hand/eye coordination -- those sports being important subjects for all American public schools LMFAO). He did go pro and still is, indeed, the (im)perfect hero that could be the MC of a Daiya spinoff and/or jdrama. Very few outsiders know he had an extremely hard knock life and earned his skills through buckets of blood, sweat and I'm assuming the desire to cry. His people don't cry, it's a cultural thing.
> 
> This fic is not based on his story, but I do want all y'all to know that Furuyas exist, get injured, and win the ace title. That doesn't mean Sawamuras can't, though.  
> 

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm 98% certain that I'm in serious contention to win an Oscar for my role as Best Supporting Actor in a Foreign Gay Sports Tragedy. Note that I'm not even the main character.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I made some OCD edits....oops. I can't stop. Everyone has terribly embarrassing and poorly conjugated nicknames. Everyone is gay (blame Sawamura), like gay enough to start their own pride parade complete with rainbow streamers, purple hair dye and glitter makeup. And high heels but don't tell Kanemaru because he'll flip out.“ψ(｀∇´)ψ THAT MIGHT HAPPEN OMG A SEIDO PRIDE PARADE.(*≧艸≦)  
>   
> Listen to the soundtrack online via the [Spotify webplayer](https://play.spotify.com/user/1268346461/playlist/6ssZzsPOKLWUTEb2P8lUBy).  
>   
> If you want to open it in a separate window, copy/paste the following URI into the Spotify search field: _spotify:user:1268346461:playlist:6ssZzsPOKLWUTEb2P8lUBy_  
>  I would embed the player here but AO3 doesn't support iframes.

* * *

Profile

diary: 公然の秘密 kōzen no himitsu  
user ID: なるだ詩 narudashi  
name: 金丸 信二 Kanemaru Shinji  
gender: o male  
time: 11時20分 11:20 am  
date: 2015年4月1日(水) 1 April 2015  
location: 9th circle of hell  
weather: shitty

narudashi's pic of the day

I'll make this crystal clear and state at the outset that this diary is not, in fact, a love story, or a confession of any sort. I say that just because my co-author is, at this moment, attracting starry-eyed female admirers like feral cats that've cornered a tasty mouse in the prime of its tender youth (they're practically drooling over him; it's all I can do not to throw up the miso and rice I had for breakfast. I hope you're eating while you read this, Sawamura.) 

So if it's not a love story, then what is it? Basically this is an exchange diary (minus paper and doodles) on crack, and may contain one or more of the following:

  * absolute nonsense;
  * anecdotes about an overly attractive baseball idiot and
  * the misadventures of (what may appear like) his unfortunate sidekick (FML);
  * teenagers whining about first world problems;
  * heartfelt sarcasm; 
  * irony à la Sacha Baron Cohen; or
  * the chronicle of a murder mystery suitable for a horror film plot.



If it's the last one I hope I don't die and/or get tortured. Actually I've no idea what lies ahead, but it's not gay romance.

Even better, my co-author is an emo/goth/whatever-they-call-it-these-days kinda-foreign kid, whose most interesting comment to me so far has been,“Why are we having rice for breakfast? What kind of people don't eat cold cereal?" I'm not lying. I have a feeling that if I find this several years from now and try to read it, it will either make me bust a gut laughing or induce a wave of residual embarrassment that I won't overcome for weeks if not months.

How do I know it will be embarrassing? Because lately my life seems like it's been scripted by screenwriters for a Brüno-esque mockumentary on the struggles of gay high school athletes. It's become bad enough that I keep wondering if someone will start a glee club and everyone will break out into random broadway-themed song and dance skits. I'm probably just being a typical melodramatic hormonal kid, but it seriously sucks tanuki balls when you're the one narrating this embarrassing shit. Of course, no one's making me write anything revealing or ARAMA! JAPAN-worthy.

But wait, that's not all...the only other person reading this is a complete stranger that for all I know could be an undercover reporter investigating the underbelly of famous baseball schools. What he'll make of it is anyone's guess. Why am I admitting all this to a complete stranger? I guess I have no one else right now, since Hideaki has apparently heard the call of the wild and decided it was high time to sow some Tōjō-seeds. It sucks to admit, but without Hideaki I'm basically desperate for someone to listen to my sob story. And since Sawamura says we can encrypt the incriminating bits using a date-based English cipher, I know that without translation no one will be able to understand the truly embarrassing crap if it falls into the wrong hands (it's strange the things he knows, and makes me wonder what exactly he did as a child during playtime).  
The official kōkan nikki we're submitting for homework will be crap copied from classmates or some such. I guess that makes more work for the both of us, but I have to pick my battles, and this diary is the least of my troubles.

I guess I should get to the actual diary part. Here goes nothing:

Today is the first day of my first year at Seidō Kōkō. I'm currently sitting in English class, trying (i.e, failing miserably) to concentrate on writing in this shitty excuse for a diary in a shitty excuse for a language. For some reason our school has decided to run headlong with scissors into the 21st century and integrate shitty Windows tablets and laptops in the classroom. The golden days of paper notebook kōkan nikki have been replaced by a shittastical Android app, one rated below 3 at that. Although it's convenient to write in from wherever we can access our accounts, I feel like this shit is going to be leaked out to Twitter whenever a hacker feels like fucking with me (or the screenwriter feels the need to add an element of tension to the next episode of _Seidō: Baseball Boys Tell All_ ).

This used to be my favorite subject, at least the one in which I had no trouble concentrating. Today, I can't remember which order dates are supposed to go in English - is it Day/Month/Year, or Year/Month/Day? (although I think there might be several ways. I had to ask Google-sensei in the end. I was wrong, of course). It took me 15 FUCKING MINUTES to translate the date in this entry. You may ask, dear reader (if you laugh I will hunt you down and kill you, Sawamura), what in the world could possibly be screwing with me so badly?

I have 99 problems and a bitch ain't one, but I'll take pity on you son and only list the first ten or so here:

1) I think I might be gay. About, 99.9% certain. The 0.1% is based on a boner I got (re)watching an old Katy Perry music video recently. It's only 0.1% because there was also a hot guy in it (you know, the alien one? he's hot, right?).

2) I'm about 99% certain I'm gay for my best friend. The 1% is there because if I said 100% I'd have a heart attack, puke or both.

3) I'm 100% certain my best friend is straight. I know that because I found him making out with one of the managers last night.

4) There's about 0% likelihood that I'm going to get on the first string this year, or maybe even the next. No matter how good you are in middle school, it's nothing compared to high school level baseball. My senpai are so obsessed with the game that I wouldn't put it past them to sleep with their bats because they get lonely without them.

5) I have a better chance at being voted "Most Likely to Die a Virgin" than playing in a first string game this year. Lately I have absolutely no game in any sense of the word. Even worse, I keep catching myself making pathetic lovelorn sighs and sneaking longing glances at Hideaki. I'm willing to bet someone could draw a great angsty BL manga illustrating my spectacular failure at getting the boy I like to return my affection (I'm thinking something along the lines of Loveless, with less supernatural shit, and more jokes; I'd imagine it'd do well as an anime, seeing how much of a comic fool I look all the time, and assuming I actually get laid at some point *bows low in supplication to the great mangaka in the sky*).

6) I'm 98% certain that I'm in serious contention to win an Oscar for my role as Best Supporting Actor in a Foreign Gay Sports Tragedy. Note that I'm not even the main character.

7) I've been ordered to tutor the emo foreign kid in all his subjects, and he's a complete idiot that I'm willing to bet never took an entrance exam.

8) I'm about 2 seconds away from strangling him.

9) My shōjo manga collection fell out of a box and got drenched in the rain en route to the dorms. Now I have nothing to use as an excuse for sobbing out of self pity like a little baby. 

10) The new emo kid has decided that we need this lame "heart-to-heart" exchange diary because he was smoking too much peace pipe and had a dream that told him we need to become friends of the Bananaman variety.

Let me tell you about the new headache in my life, Sawamura Eijun, or as I prefer to call him (in my head), Emo-chan. He's an American hāfu transfer kid, apparently half Native - some tribe near Seattle, maybe - I really didn't listen to that part. IMHO I can't tell any difference between a full Japanese and a hāfu like Emo-chan. I mean, his skin isn't darker, he has freckles, he doesn't braid his hair with leather, there are no feathers lurking anywhere in his immediate vicinity, he has no mysterious spiritual aura, and knows nothing about buffalo or bow-hunting (the latter something of a disappointment, tbh). That's not to say that he doesn't turn heads at Seidō, with many giving him a 2nd look (or 3rd, or 4th, if you're the kind of shōjo heroine that prefers a bad boy). At first, you might notice some superficial things that mark him as different, but based on my experience with him, he's also either bat-shit crazy or very eccentric.

Just to be fair, I'll list out for posterity the 10 fucked up things about Sawamura Emo-chan:

1) He makes no effort to style his hair, but it nevertheless ends up as a sexy distressed-to-impress faux hawk, reminiscent of some of those kpop boy band stars (which, under the circumstances, is more palatable than say, a white kid trying the same thing).

2) His eyes are an eerie kind of golden/amber color that shifts in the light and seem to shine brighter when he's angry. Tbh they remind me of fish eyes *shudders*.

3) I have no idea how this happened, but based on what I saw in the showers last night (I was not staring, but I was traumatized, thank you very much), most of his upper body and *yikes* crotch area are covered in tattoos. Those must have hurt like a bitch. There's got to be an age limit on that kind of thing, but this kid seems to defy rational thought and sometimes the laws of physics (more on that later).

4) He has piercings EVERYWHERE. Some are in the usual places, but some are DOWN THERE OMFG SO SCARY.

5) When he bends over and his shirt rides up, you can see the sort of arrow bit in his elaborate back tattoo that more or less points directly towards his ass (I'll leave the rest to your imagination), as if in open invitation (also in your imagination, which is probably quite pervy - just a gut feeling, as I'll freely admit to being fairly pervy myself).

6) No matter what sexual identity you've got prior to meeting Sawamura, there’s a 75% chance of you turning gay (or straight, if you're a lesbian) immediately upon meeting him (the other 25% is left for statistical aberrations and Oblivious-kuns like one of our teammates, Furuya Satoru).

7) He's silent and never smiles at anyone in Seidō, but gets really loud and excited when his friends from overseas call.

8) When he does smile, the whole world seems to light up, shōjo flowers appear, and those nearby are stricken with incurable cases of Bloody Nose Syndrome.

9) His ripped skinny jeans are probably illegal in some former Soviet states, Sub-Saharan Africa and the entire Middle East.

10) Ridiculous doesn't even begin to describe him on the field: not only can he pitch as a southpaw, but he has no dominant hand. Meaning HE'S FUCKING INSANE, possessed by a yōkai bent on the complete destruction of Inajitsu (Isashiki-senpai's latest theory) or just has good genes. Nevertheless, he's got equally shitty control when pitching with either arm.

So with that I've exhausted my limited supply of I-give-a-shit for the day. I need to buy some sob-excuse shōjo and induct Sawamura into the traditional Japanese custom of drowning your sorrows in manga. By tomorrow I'm sure Emo-chan will have plenty to contribute to this unlove story.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My snapcracklepop Pinterest [TGATE](https://www.pinterest.com/magicmau5/tgate-acrack-on-%E3%81%AEa/) board hosts a collection of various writing prompts and stuff like how Kanemaru and Sawamura encrypt their diary.
> 
>  **Chapter 1 Glossary**
> 
> kōzen no himitsu (公然の秘密) means "open secret."
> 
> kōkan nikki (交換日記) means "exchange diary." It's commonly exchanged between friends in school; this instance is unusual because it's part of the English curriculum. Usually one person writes in it on one day, another person the next day. In Kanemaru's class they're using a parody of the ぼくらの交換日記 (Our Exchange Diary) app by Cuatro D, which is actually pretty shitty.
> 
> Can you guess where Kanemaru's username comes from? Hint: check the meaning of the kanji used for shi (詩) .
> 
> The Japanese school year starts in April.
> 
> Typical Japanese date/time notation:  
> Date: YYYY[kanji for year, 年]MM[kanji for month,月]DD[kanji for day,日](week day, 水) The 1st character of the weekday often is preferred; in this case it's 水曜日 or Wednesday.  
> Time: Based on a 24-hr clock, HH[kanji for hour, 時]MM[kanji for minute, 分].
> 
> Hāfu/haafu (ハーフ) means someone that is biracial, usually half Japanese.
> 
> Sacha Baron Cohen is a British comedian of Jewish descent and has starred in some pretty inappropriate yet extremely hilarious movies like Brüno (2009).
> 
> ARAMA! JAPAN is a Japanese pop culture blog. The Korean version is called OMONA THEY DIDN'T! 
> 
> Bananaman (バナナマン) is a Japanese owarai comedy duo that includes Osamu Shitara and Yūki Himura.
> 
> A yōkai (妖怪) is a supernatural being, something like a ghost, demon, monster or goblin.


	2. raven and emo boy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My life at Seidō is like a bunch of Saved by the Bell repeats that don’t provide a studio audience or closed captioning in English.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Want to know what Sawamura and Kanemaru are listening to? Check out the OST online via the [Spotify webplayer](https://play.spotify.com/user/1268346461/playlist/6ssZzsPOKLWUTEb2P8lUBy).  
>   
> If you want to open it in a separate window, copy/paste the following URI into the Spotify search field: _spotify:user:1268346461:playlist:6ssZzsPOKLWUTEb2P8lUBy_  
>   
>  I'm very thankful for the concrit and supportive words. This website is much different than Adult Fan Fiction and I'm still getting used to it!

* * *

 

Profile

diary:  公然の秘密 kōzen no himitsu  
user ID:投手一 tōshuichi  
name:沢村 栄純Sawamura Eijun  
gender:o male  
time:18時05分  6:05 pm  
date:2015年4月2日(木)Thursday, April 2, 2015  
location:Hotel Seidōfornia, Rm #5  
weather:cloudy with a chance of light angst

tōshuichi's pic of the day

  

quote of the day: _“I am presently experiencing life at a rate of several WTF’s per hour.”_ (quoteslife101.net)

This is all so surreal. A couple weeks ago I was dancing at the Arches with Ash, some of his model friends and a bunch of third years. It was the first Valentines Day I had a boyfriend, first time I actually needed the condom in my back pocket, first time I was actually happy since Corey died. Probably the best day of my life. I went to sleep at 5 am the next day, wrapped up in Ash’s arms, probably wearing that goofy smile he says he loves. By noon the same day I was packing my bags for Nagano. 

Kanemaru was really enjoying throwing his own word vomit pity party yesterday, so I think I’ll indulge in a vent sesh of my own. I can relate all my entertaining trials and tribulations so that Kanemaru can become a wise disciple of Eijun and share the good news of Karma Is A Bitch. He thinks it sucks to be gay in a straight, immature high school baseball club. Maybe he needs to learn a little about how much it sucks to see your brother die in a car wreck. Or how shitty it feels to hear your dad tell you it’s time to move again, when you’ve just started to make friends in a town you arrived in only a year ago. I’m sure he’ll love to read about what it feels like to be afraid to go to sleep, because you’ll have lucid dreams that will determine whether you live or die. 

I think Kanemaru set a good precedent with the 10 Things lists, so I’m gonna make a couple of my own. Today let’s discuss the 10 Things I Hate About Seidō:

1\. My life at Seidō is like a bunch of Saved by the Bell repeats that don’t provide a studio audience or closed captioning in English. Everybody is running on a eat-study-sleep-repeat hamster wheel without thinking about why they’re doing it. They’re way more attractive than they have any right to be - I mean what kind of (straight) guy does their hair every day just for school? The girls all seem to have makeup on, the guys are incredibly naive and probably virgins (sorry/not sorry Kanemaru), the pop culture discussed makes no sense to me, and there’s the token “Me So Pretty” douchebucket jockstrap-happy sports hero everyone loves to hate but secretly masturbates to when they’re alone (see #4 below). I hope I’m not Screech in this analogy. (FYI, I don’t masturbate to images of him. I might’ve had a guilty jerk-off sesh or 2 about a certain guy-that-will-not-be-named, but that’s neither here nor there.)

2\. No Wheaties, no champions. I am forced to eat 3 bowls of rice each morning in addition to whatever weird NON-SUGARCOATED CEREAL items are available. How can I honestly belt out “We Are The Champions” to my heart’s content when we win Kōshien if I don’t eat my Wheaties????? At bare minimum, I need some Cheerios. GIMME A BREAK PPL.

3\. No Homo-senpai, No Pudding-senpai. I have to live in a dorm room the size of a sardine can with 2 other guys that may or may not have heard of an invention called antiperspirant. First is Kuramochi Yōichi, a closet-case “no homo” sadistic bastard that’s constantly trying to wrestle with me (that is, cop a feel). Then there’s Masuko Tooru, who I swear is the reincarnation of Buddha’s evil twin, as he loves torturing me with forbidden pudding cups. (And they wonder why I wake up extra early to go running. You’d run away too if you lived with these maniacs!)

4\. Weretanuki-senpai. While the majority of my senpai on the team are more or less friendly, he goes above and beyond the call of duty to tease his kōhai. Miyuki Kazuya is living proof that it’s possible to conceive via anal sex. He’s such a huge asshole that I can’t imagine he was born any other way. On the surface he’s your standard human baseball catcher but he can’t fool me (he’s on the 1st string now but he totally stole the no. 2 jersey from Tenpa-senpai, aka Takigawa Chris Yuu - more on that in the next episide). I’m pretty sure he’s a shapeshifting coyote, a werecoyote if you will; he’s sly enough to fit the bill. I think Japanese people’d call him a weretanuki, since tanukis are a bit like coyotes in that they’re devious, tricky little critters that you can’t trust. He also thinks he’s hot shit because some kids call him pretty boy and girls like to confess their undying love for His Royal Tanukiness. Compared to the feline grace of Ash on a Parisian catwalk, Miyuki crouched behind a batter looks like a lawn gnome trying to peek under an elderly gardener’s skort.

5\. Tattoophobia. Although the Japanese have a long tradition of beautiful tattoo artistry (I’ve been told it was a big deal during the Edo period) I guess it’s taboo for the average person to have a body tattoo like mine. People look at my skin and see disrespect or something, but don’t ask me if the designs mean anything, how I got them, or who the artist is. My uncle drew the animals that are in my tattoo, and I think it’s actually prophetic based on the fucked up dreams I’ve been having lately. The raven looks awfully familiar to me. Anyway, I looked online and it seems the yakuza have some pretty sweet back tats, but I don’t think being compared to a yakuza member is a good thing among proper Japanese society. Every single Japanese person who catches a glimpse of my tats when I get undressed or change my clothes looks like they’re on the verge of fainting or just swallowed some particularly ripe roadkill. I mean, I’m used to taking off my shirt when I get gross and sweaty from skating. It gets really humid here, and in school we have to wear these godawful suits designed to make kids cringe in embarrassment (probably to discourage the use of Snapchat or taking too many selfies). We also wear these completely unnecessary shrink-wrap compression shirts under our baseball jerseys. Unbelievably, we actually wear that in all weather - no matter how many buckets of sweat come pouring out. When I innocently tried to take off a couple layers during practice the other day, everyone frowned and looked at me like I’d rolled in a pile of dogshit then smeared it all over the inside of a Shintō shrine. They’re really into following rules and regulations here. It’s so different from America, Scotland, and all the other places I’ve lived. 

6\. I’m linguistically challenged. I can’t speak Japanese fluently, and making sense out of kanji, hiragana, and katakana is like trying to read the tiniest letter on the chart at the eye doctor’s office from a mile away. I’m being tutored by a capable if resentful Kanemaru, but trying to become the ace and pass my courses in a foreign language will probably be the death of me, whether or not I pass the tengu dream tests.

7\. I am cursed. I have a sneaking suspicion that Raven, my guardian spirit, is a crack head. When I first met him in Glasgow, during a dream as I slept beside Ash, I knew he must either be playing an elaborate prank on me or high (probably both). He ordered me to come to Seidō and become the ace pitcher or I’d die and some unknown catastrophe would occur. He said this knowing full well that Seidō is nationally known in Japan for its baseball team, and that I have a small fraction of the talent my brother had. Raven also laughs in a sort of maniacal way at his own inappropriate jokes, which are timed to make the most destructive impact on my composure. Like when Miyuki says “Nice ball!” to Furuya, Raven will chuckle and say, “Hahaha Furuya he likes your balls, bet he wants a little taste!” Then Miyuki will catch for me and Raven will bust out with, “Such a slutty catcher, he wants your balls too, Eijun!” Nobody else can see Raven. If I dare laugh a teensy bit I look like I'm insane. It’s all I can do not to run away in hysterics, giggling like a mad loon into the sunset.

8\. My tengu are out to get me. There are eight more crazy spirits lurking about Tokyo that will adopt me over the course of my 3 years at Seidō. I’m convinced they’ll seek to make my life even more miserable and probably turn me into a lunatic in need of a straight jacket by the time I become ace. Eight spirit guardians are unheard of where I come from. In Japan they call them tengu, and people think of them as bird-like demons. Among the Wasco, you receive protection and guidance from an animal spirit you meet in a vision quest-type meditation thing in the wilderness (assuming you’re raised traditionally). They’re the same thing, but with different names and faces. I guess Japanese people have stopped talking to their tengu. It kind of makes me sad to imagine how lonely it must be to go through life thinking you’re all alone. I know Christians have the whole guardian angel thing, but most also think angels and demons are figments of their imagination. If they were visited nightly by a raven the size of a grown man, who forced them to walk among another boy’s NSFW dreams, then wake up with evidence of participating in whatever sick fantasy the perverted kid was imagining during the daytime, I bet they’d rethink their narrow worldview (or shit their pants - probably both). 

I haven’t even begun the real dream tests - the ones that will determine who I’ll end up with. Like, the person I’ll have to live with forever. As in, “life partner” or “spouse” or that person you claim on your taxes as using part of your household income. 

9\. Y u no like me? The only person at Seidō that I feel safe enough with to talk about this nightmarish clusterfuck is a guy called Kanemaru Shinji. Now in theory, someone that you trust and feel comfortable around would probably be pleasant to hang out with and maybe smile at you now and then. Unfortunately, Kanemaru thinks I’m disabled enough to warrant transport to and from games via my own short yellow bus. I know I don’t have a lot of book smarts, but I can track the path of a single quail through a field of sagebrush (at least I could a few years back), and I bet there aren’t many people at this school who could say the same. So I’m willing to let Kanemaru call me Emo-chan if I can call him Munewaru-kun or Shinishinji.

10\. Ash isn’t here. I miss him so much that when I see he’s liked one of my Facebook posts, sent me a tweet, or re-pinned one of my pics on Pinterest, I choke up and have to hide in a bathroom stall so I can cry in  peace. We talk on Line and Skype, but it’s just not the same. I’ve taken to listening to depressing music lately that makes me feel like a wet rag soaked in tears and snot (like “Heart Attack” by Flight Facilities or anything by Keane). I know he’s trying, but we live too far away to stay together indefinitely. The worst part is that because he doesn’t go to Seidō or even live in Tokyo, I won’t end up with him anyway.

That’s why I hate Seidō. I tore my heart out and left it in Glasgow with Ash. What remains is an empty hole that no amount of baseballs or rice bowls can fill.

On that cheery note, I’m signing off because I think most of this was TMI for Munewaru-kun. If he runs away from me screaming after reading this, I’ll totally understand.

And now a message from Raven:

Hey Kanemaru, can you please stop whining about Tōjō because plenty of your soft porn fantasies will come true soon enough. Here’s proof I’m not lying: one of your favorite masturbation rituals involves YouTube, the search term “kikkō shibari” and self-instruction with a large amount of rope. Actually that’s really TMI for me. And slightly troubling. 

Back to Sawamura: 

SHIT SHIT SHIT SHINISHINJI you better quit with the ecchi fantasies already because the tengu are attracted to porno dreams like flies on a horse’s ass. THAT BETTER NOT TURN YOU ON YOU PERV. Yuck. Rope and….stuff. Excuse me while I go ask Google-sensei how to purge traumatic images from my brain.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Chapter 2 Glossary**
> 
>  
> 
> A tōshu (投手) is a baseball pitcher.
> 
> In this instance, ichi (一) means “best of” or “number one” in something.
> 
> “Shintō (‘the way of the gods’) is the indigenous faith of the Japanese people and as old as Japan itself. It remains Japan's major religion alongside Buddhism.” (japan-guide.com) The Shintō (神道) faith has major and minor deities called kami (神), whom you’d logically think I’d associate a guardian spirit with. However, most kami are actual gods often associated with ancestors that might have animal messengers, but are not animalistic in nature themselves. That’s why I chose tengu, who might be prone to mischief and whose primary manifestation is animalistic.
> 
> “Tengu (天狗) are a type of legendary creature found in Japanese folk religion and are also considered a type of Shinto god (kami) or yōkai (supernatural beings).” (Wikipedia)
> 
> Munewaru (胸悪) is an archaic adjective that means “unpleasant, being mean, or a mean person.” It’s like Sawamura is calling Kanemaru “Meanie-kun” with the nickname Munewaru-kun.
> 
> Shini (死に) means “damned”, so Sawamura calls Kanemaru something like Damned Shinji with the nickname Shinishinji. These are totally my crack invention that aren’t real words in Japanese!
> 
> Kikkō shibari (亀甲縛り) is a type of full-body rope bondage used in shibari, the Japanese practice of consensual erotic rope-binding. Kikkō means tortoise and is also a fabric weaving design. The kikkō recreates the six-sided shape of a tortoise shell with rope tied in specific forms across a (naked) person’s body. It’s not a karada or simple diamond body weave. …..Kanemaru got a little kinkier in this chapter for some reason. (I'm sorry/すみません, Yuji Terajima!)


	3. nuclear fission love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The French call it la douleur exquise. It means the heart-wrenching, exquisite pain of desiring someone that’s completely unattainable. It’s pretty fucking exquisite, believe you me. If it got any more exquisite I’d be asking for the torture and not ecchi rope-binding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ladies and gentlemen of the Daiya doujin, I give you….Kanesawa cheese! The cheesiest Kanesawa no money can buy! Balls are flying everywhere, and you’ll need to defend your poor psyches from too much erotic description. No hemp or silk rope was harmed in the production of this chapter. I don’t think I need a glossary here, but if there is confusion I’ll try to clarify something for you. Um, I actually didn’t sleep so I could write this. Which spells certain doom for me at work. But this was calling to me with it’s crack siren song…
> 
> Oh, and before I forget, here's the obligatory playlist shoutout courtesy of [Spotify](https://play.spotify.com/user/1268346461/playlist/6ssZzsPOKLWUTEb2P8lUBy).  
>   
> To open it in a separate window, copy/paste this URI into the Spotify search field: _spotify:user:1268346461:playlist:6ssZzsPOKLWUTEb2P8lUBy_  
>   
> 

* * *

diary: 公然の秘密 kōzen no himitsu  
user ID: なるだ詩 narudashi  
time: idk  
date: day after last entry duh  
location: wooden cross, Mount Seidōntcare  
weather: something is in the sky like a cloud or whatever

narudashi's pic of the day

Okay so this will all be tmi for you and Raven but you asked for it, so you’re gonna get it.

I’m just going to write this for you, Emo-chan. I don’t really give a shit about anyone else reading this. They wouldn’t understand anyway.

I’m dying. I hate my life. Everything sucks fried tanu ballsacks with a side of tanu crabs. (Lol did I forget to tell you about His Royal Crabbyness? Omg it’s just too good to keep to myself. But this is encrypted so I think you fully comprehend the gravity of the confidential information I’m about to reveal to you. But first, a word from our sponsors, Melo-san and Drama-san).

Melo-san says I have to apologize first. Drama-san said I should talk about Hideaki. Captain McCrabbypants will have to wait. Oh, and who the fuck is this Aomine guy you were talking about at lunch? If he’s that hot I need to at least see a picture. NOW IS BETTER THAN LATER, SAWAMURA. Time is of the essence. Maybe I can steal him first cause you already got Ash, do you really need an Aomine as well??? Stop being so stingy, god.

So back to the main event:

I’M SORRY I WAS A DOUCHEBAGEL OF EPIC PROPORTIONS. There, I said it. I’m sorry for being such a miyukihole. That’s not me, and if you keep writing in this diary you’ll begin to understand who I am and why I’ve been acting like a miyukihole ever since we met.

I did some research last night in a completely non-stalkerish way and learned some stuff about Warm Springs, Wasco people, Corey and even Ash (holy shit he’s hot, HOW DID YOU EVEN??????!!! I can’t believe how much of a sidekick I am in this unlove story. Please tell me I’m going to get some action at some point? I mean, this is getting ridiculous). Your life has been about 1000 times more difficult than mine. But I do think you came here for a reason, even if it was just to help pull my head out of my ass so that I can finally act my age (at least, a mature 15 year old that is willing to say he’s been more of an idiot than you could ever be). I have a lot of ideas about how you can pull your own head out of your ass, because it is a bit stuck down there imho. It’s alright, I’ll return the favor and help you pull it out. I think that’s a topic for another day, though. I’m going to be selfish and dedicate this entry to me. [LOL imagine if I said that at a karaoke night “this song goes out to that hottie on the stage, ME!” and everyone looks at each other like, "Kanemaru's high, isn't he?"]

Since we’re not being graded on this, I’m gonna cut the crap and not worry about grammar and spelling. English is seriously a pain in the ass. But once you get the hang of it, it’s not so bad….I suppose a bit like you, Emo-chan. Munewaru is a fairly good estimate of the way I act when I get frustrated, tired, etc, and lately I’m frustrated with EVERYTHING (and you know what things I’m talking about, because I’m pretty sure you’re in the same sinking ship). It makes sense that you think I’m mean. But I’m not, really, and Hideaki can attest to that. Okay so I’m a bit of a jerk, or maybe more than a bit, but I’ve never really cared enough before to think about how someone would feel around me.

I mean, this is so fucking weird, right? One diary entry from you and I’m suddenly all introspective and sensitive to feelings and all that cheesy girly shit. Look, I know American cheese isn’t as good as other cheeses but I’m willing to be a little adventurous now and again. As long as you don’t make me eat American versions of Japanese food, I won’t say a word about disgusting Kraft slices of krap. There, that’s the last time I take the name of Kraft in vain. I swear. Really. And now you know I’m secretly just as crazy as you, Sawamura.

So, less about you and more about me. I’m obsessed with Hideaki, or the idea of loving Hideaki, but I’ve never actually thought about life from his point of view. Maybe if I had, I’d have figured out sooner that he’s so straight his dick probably points in an arrow to vaginas like a dowsing rod. That’s not to say that I don’t love him, and I think that every single thing he does is so fucking cute but still, if he doesn’t feel the horrible shivers and spine tingles and electric pulses I get around him, then theres absolutely no point. I mean, WHAT IS THE FUCKING POINT of anything anymore? God I feel like a fucking girl, I just want to cry and scream “why me?” because I didn’t ask to be gay, it’s not like I deliberately WANTED to check out his ass when I know that’s not what I’m supposed to do. If you could see me right now you’d realize I’m just….miserable. Hopeless. Helpless. Hapless. Are there any more English words starting with H that I can use here? Because I can’t think of any word in the English language to express what I’m feeling right now.

The French call it la douleur exquise. It means the heart-wrenching, exquisite pain of desiring someone that’s completely unattainable. It’s pretty fucking exquisite, believe you me. If it got any more exquisite I’d be asking for the torture and not ecchi rope-binding.

So just for clarity’s sake, I’d be tying up Hideaki and not vice versa. I guess it’s about the control? I mean, I want him to feel good, I need it so badly it hurts more than anything you could possibly imagine in any of your wildest lucid dreams. I want to be the one to make him feel the pleasure, the pain, and everything that makes life worth living. I don’t want submission. I want trust, trust that he knows from the bottom of his heart that I’d never, ever hurt him. If I did somehow intentionally make him cry, I’d fucking cut off my right hand. I want him to know that, and see that in my eyes when he’s naked and tied up like the most beautiful Christmas present Santa could bring in his sleigh.

That doesn’t mean I don’t want to feel him physically, or reject him if he makes a move (and you know it’d be a fucking sexy move, have you seen his ass? I know you have, don’t lie). It’s just that I need to be the one to set the stage, so I can be sure he’s having the most pleasure - I really don’t give a fuck about my own orgasm. (What am I saying? You’ve made me insane, Emo-chan, but I guess it’s better this way) I mean, even if I wanted to last more than a minute or two, if I were just fucking him like a rutting hog, I would get absolutely no satisfaction from touching him alone. It’s not about kisses, bites, or fingernails scratching my back. It’s about what’s going on inside his head, and inside mine. Our brains are the best erogenous zones, did you know that?

For me, rope-binding takes sex to the next level, a level where you can see the evidence of how strong your relationship is. The rope tells him how much I need him bound to me, and how far I’m willing to go to keep him there. The rope isn’t for humiliation, or pain, or degradation. It’s there to keep him safe, so that he doesn’t leave me - because if he actually loved me the way I loved him, he’d know that it’s dangerous to be separated. Nuclear fission bombs are made when they split the center of an atom. It’s unnatural for the atom to be in pieces, because it can only exist in relationship to the particles within it. What I want, what I need, is a love stronger than most people are willing to provide and receive. I need something so close, so tight, so perfect that if people tried to break us apart, we would burst into a colossal fireball, raining death and destruction in every direction for countless miles. We’d make an explosion big enough to level an entire nation. That’s what the rope is for.

When I tie the knots multiple times, it’s like we’re getting married over and over and over. One measly ceremony is not enough for me. If I’m in love, I want that shit to happen on a regular basis. How could anyone ever be satisfied with a single public declaration of love and commitment? Isn’t it better for me to tie you up with hemp rope in dozens of intricate knots, use sense deprivation and a chest full of toys so that we make each other cum with a single word? You’d be too tired to keep your eyes open, so I’d have to untie the knots (because that’s what I do, I have serious knot tying skills I’m not kidding it’s somewhat disturbing when I think about it objectively), and repeat from step 1? That’s a rhetorical question, Sawamura. And I wasn’t saying I’d have sex with you, that was a completely hypothetical situation between me and the ideal guy. Who isn’t you. 

The fact of the matter is that I want to be Hideaki’s rock, his foundation, the safest place he can be.

But it’s also a fact that he doesn’t need to be kept safe, doesn’t want to be so close he’s inside my skin and I’m in his. He doesn’t need to be part of a Kanemaru atom. He’s making his own way with someone else that will make him happier than I could ever make him. So it’s best if I let him be happy the way he is. I do love him the way I described in so much embarrassing detail above. That means I’m happy if he’s happy. It’s a painful kind of happy, and I won’t lie and say that talking about this doesn’t make me cry. Because it does, and I am. But if I force him to do anything that he’s uncomfortable with, I’d have to cut off my hand. And we both know that’s a bad idea. 

Just so you know if by some miracle he sees the purple light and realizes he’s bi, HIDEAKI IS MINE not yours okay? I don’t share. EVER.

Ahhh I love the word “miyukihole.” Doesn’t it sound sweet? Despite la douleur exquise, I managed to make a new cuss word that bridges the divide between the two of us, Sawamura. Yes, you can laugh now. It’s obvious there’s no divide anymore so what the fuck am I waiting for? An opportunity to tell someone everything I’ve been hiding, knowing that you’re so miserable that you won’t even be fazed by all this shit, is too good to pass up.

And now it’s time for CAPTAIN MCCRABBYPANTS! Guess what? Miyuki HAS CRABS OF THE CROTCH VARIETY!!! Hahahahahahahaha I can’t stop laughing it’s terrible, I’m terrible but I love it. At least he had them the last time I saw your best friend No Homo-senpai in the locker room. Kuramochi was doing the hyena cackle dance and of course I was curious. He was too far gone to cover his phone, so I managed to see a snapshot of Miyuki’s disgusting wriggly crotch crustaceans. It was very scary, believe me, and I wanted to burn my eyes. I actually went in the toilet because I thought I was going to puke. I WAS LITERALLY NAUSEATED by the pic. Of course No Homo-senpai swore me to secrecy. I almost feel bad for telling you, but not that bad.

So I did you a favor with the crabs tip, right? I hope that means you won’t have sex with him soon. Not that it’s a big deal to me or anything. But I want you to stay away from the crabs! If you see one, run as fast as you can in the opposite direction, but not before you take a pic. How’s about a blog called Texts from Seidō? We can get loads of crab infested crotch shots from Google-sensei and put in captions like “Miyuki’s pubes sure are comfortable.” I mean, I bet he can’t even read English half as well as the average dog. Even better, we can just call him Tanuki Kazuyarō. I mean, those aren’t his actual names….but everyone will recognize him immediately when you link Kazuya and yarō together. Because nothing goes better together than a Kazuya + bastard!

 


	4. pube-tono and tortyhippo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This whole thing is fucked up. I dont know what the test itself will be - Raven said its a different test for each dream and I have no preparation other than to know everything in the dream is real, and every decision I make will affect reality. Why this has to happen in dreams, I dont know. But I imagine going from bed to bed in Hotel Seidōfornia isn’t a great way of making friends here or impressing the Boss. And it’d probably spread crabs or sumthing. THE CRABS BETTER NOT BE IN A TANUKI-SENPAI DREAM OMFG. ∴(O艸O★)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ｍ(｡≧ _ ≦｡)ｍ Lo siento, I’m sorry for adding this a day later than I promised to you, meredream. I thought it wouldn’t take that long, but I’m too verbose and kept adding bits and pieces here and there.  
> I introduced an OC in this chapter but will likely not involve him much. This is taking more chapters than I thought, so it’ll probably become pretty long for a fanfic.
> 
> Remember, you can listen to the OST playlist online, brought to you by your local neighborhood [Spotify webplayer](https://play.spotify.com/user/1268346461/playlist/6ssZzsPOKLWUTEb2P8lUBy).  
>   
> To open it in a separate window, copy/paste this URI into the Spotify search field: _spotify:user:1268346461:playlist:6ssZzsPOKLWUTEb2P8lUBy_  
>   
>  Also I'm sorry I previously spelled it as -dono when it's _spelled_ -tono but _pronounced_ -dono like tao is pronounced dao.

 

* * *

diary: 公然の秘密 kōzen no himitsu  
user ID:投手一 tōshuichi  
time:03時17分 3:17 am  
date:2015年4月4日(土)Saturday, April 4, 2015  
location:Hotel Seidōfornia, ground floor, vending machine, shitty hard bench  
weather:a dark and horny night

tōshuichi's pic of the day

quote of the day:  _“How many times is it appropriate to say ‘what?’ before you just nod and smile because you still didn’t hear or understand a word they said?”_ (themetapicture.com)

dear pervdog,

srsly I’m having trouble understanding Harucchi lately, and that damn Furuya too. щ(ಠ益ಠщ) God I hate that Benpishita-kun sometimes!!!! I mean, all things considered he’s a lot better pitcher than me, since his whole life is baseball. But what’s more annoying is his expressionless face. Did you ever just wanna punch someone in the nads? Do you even know what nads are? LMFAO that’d be really funny…my friends in LA call them all sorts a shit like hairy baseballs, huevos con leche, spicy meatballs, cheesy eggs, etc but it’s just short for “gonads” or testes. Like, TESTICLES lol. Nads is best, I think.

(Do u like my pic of the day? Lol i also like quotes, esp from themetapicture and the ecards and stuff). its good to quit the grammar police. I guess I was thinking abt handing the diary in to Smexay-sensei (Suzuki-sensei) just to fuck with him but I hate writing anyway. So this is probs better.

I wouldn’t mind having a go with Smexay-sensei , like bent over his desk, or up against the wall or tied to his chair with like a dildo shoved up my ass |ω･)و ̑̑…OMG WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME U RUINED ME U GROSS LECH but im so horny right now and YOU’VE TOTALLY MADE ME 100X PERVIER U PERVDOG U (*｀へ´*). But it’s not much use, you know, he’s older than Mount Seidōntcare (LMAO that was a good one, Maru - sry that’s easier to say and shorter to type ┐(‘～`；)┌)

oh yeah I srsly like ur ppls kaomoji, I think that’s my fave part of turning japanese (♪I think im turning japanese I rly think so♪/dadada da da da da/♪turning japanese I think im turning japanese I rly think so♪/dadada da da da daヾ(⌐■_■)ノ♪) LMFAO sry/not sry. Hahahahahahahahaha here’s more kmoji:

ヾ(´∀｀○)ﾉ ｡ﾟ✶ヽ(*´∀`*)ﾉ.✶ฺﾟ｡=。:.ﾟ☆ミヾ(∇≦((ヾ(≧∇≦)〃))≧∇)ノ彡☆

Sooooo….Ive decided that you’re probably clinically insane. (⊙_⊙) I mean WHAT THE FLYING FUCK was that shit about nuclear fission yesterday? Are you seriously smoking crack, did you get it from Raven? Is it pot? Meth? Because thats some srsly fucked up shit, about blowing up a nation, especially considering WORLD WAR FUCKING II AND THE H BOMB and stuff. tbh I don’t remember which one was the H bomb and what the other one was called. I bet youd know.

History is not exactly my best subject. Or any of the white ppl school subjects. Im pretty much only good at tracking(I miss that sooo much), baseball (kind of), basketball (altho Im kinda short - don’t u dare laugh - I played all through elem. and junior high), soccer, tennis, football (American? I guess) and just about every sport except badminton. I HATE SHUTTLECOCKS but the cock part is funny isnt it? Lol Ive gotten off track.

The point is WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU OMFG. Seriously, wtf. I suppose its kinda romantic (?) but mostly just creepy and it makes me wanna take you to the ER (whats it called here?) and get your head checked (the brain part you perv…ok maybe im the perv but you get my point-and it’s generally ur fault that im more pervy than ever).

Like, okay the marriage part was just too much. Like, WAAAYYYY too much. I mean, if you said that to Tōjō it’d really freak him out. I mean it freaked me out. Still is. Would u rly be willing to marry some1 that young, even if it was legal here?

I guess you’re kinda poetic but whatever. I don’t know anything abt poetry so hopefully u can help me pick a poem for the next assignment from Smexay-sensei?

Oh and tell me what ur diary username is abt because it has that poem kanji bit right? I couldn’t find anything in the dictionary. And I looked thru like 5 dictionaries. Not that I care a lot or anything. Cuz I dont. Care, that is. I mean we’re like kind of friendlyish in a totally platonic mammal-reptile way, like the way that hippopotamus and big tortoise were friends. Dibs on the hippo. I luv playing hungry hungry hippo.

Speaking of which, I need some sustenence. Like, none of this canned coffee crap that Capt. McCrabbypants drinks all the time. IT’S GOT NO CREME OR SUGAR LIKE WTF. Crabster McCrabsson has weird tastes and is weird in general. But he’s like touchyfeely all the time now. HE’S A PEDO OMG. HE’S MOLESTING ME OMG, HELP PLZ MARU!!! Save me from the crabbies….

Check this out:

Did you see Harucchi’s new tumblr? He totally went for the Texts from Seidō idea and he’s enlisted lots of the first years in his tumblr army. Even a couple senpai are in on the action - since Harucchi started it, of course Ryō-san is helping him, I mean poor Harucchi can never catch a break, right? And where Ryō-san goes, Mocheetah-senpai goes (dude they’re so gay like 2 gay peas in a gay pod sprinkled with unicorn sparkle dust). Anyway I’ve gotta show u his tanuki statue that’s like a fugly lawn gnome-type thing. It’s super gross but Harucchi and Furuya, of all ppl, put together some outfits for the little tanu. So the whole point is to take the tanu around the campus and make little tanu-selfies, then put in sum captions. Today Tōjō stuck a sign above a water fountain saying “Human” and right next to it, over the shorter water fountain for midget ppl, he posted a sign saying “Tanuki.” He took a hilarious pic of our little tanu-gnome carrying a tiny sign saying “end tanuki discrimination” in front of the fountains. (｡ >艸<) He hasn’t done the text caption tho. What do you think he should put on it?

Taking the pics is a bit hard cuz the tanu is pretty small, like abt 6 in - umm I still can’t do metric conversions so have fun with that one. It’s not like they make tanuki selfie sticks. Anyway it takes sum skill but we maneuver a phone to take a pic of the tanu like on some bleachers or a desk etc. The best one so far was when the guy who stocks the vending machine (across from where I’m sitting) helped us. Harucchi did his sweet eye thing and flipped his hair really cute, you know how he does that, and the guy let them get a tanu selfie inside the vending machine. RIGHT NEXT TO CRABBON MACPUBETH’S FAVE COFFEE!!!!!! “ψ(｀∇´)ψ “ψ(｀∇´)ψ“ψ(｀∇´)ψ GUESS WHAT ITS NAME IS. Okay I’ll give it to u since u wont see this till u wake up. The tanu is called Lord Scratchen von Pube, Duke of Crábland (aka Pube-tono).

Pube-tono

 

・:*:・(*´艸｀*)・:*:・ROTFLMFAO amirite? of course rite. (plz tell me youve seen Fiddler on the Roof becuz if you havent then we must rectify that AT ONCE).

I guess youll feel bad that I messed up and let the crabs out of the bag (ﾉ≧∇≦)ﾉ ﾐ ┸┸ (LMFAO SRY I COULDNT HELP IT MAN) but I have such a big mouth its hard 4 me to keep secrets - well, I mean its hard to keep secrets that r so exciting and just begging to be shouted out over the school loudspeaker.

But like u said no ones gonna see it anyway.

Oh so I didnt dream tonight. I guess I’ll have to get to bed sumtime but its kinda nice to talk to u here even tho ur not exactly here right? Tbh im scared to sleep. I dont wanna do the nasty with random guys, altho I’ve a feeling it’ll be guys here on the team becuz they’re nearby and obviously rly horny. I can practically feel their testosterone dripping on me when we’re in the showers. Super gross.

Altho I admit I’m rly lonely in bed (that isn’t lame it’s just honest ok gimme a fuckn break Munewaru). I used to sleep with my dog Güerrito (he was a chihuahua and named b4 I got him, it means little whitey and he was soooo cute) but he’s back in Warm Springs with my aunty Susie. Then when we moved to Vancouver BC to live with dad’s girlfriend Rose, her daughters Meg, Laurel and Lizbeth would climb in my bed at night and snuggle becuz they had nightmares…it was nice becuz Corey was already gone to college at OSU. The girls and I were practically like the Sound of Music lol…anyway everywhere we lived I’ve never slept alone. It’s like, there are guys in my room but its not the same. My bed is cold LOL I sound like some jilted lover.

Raven said I should go to bed…and dream ( ⚆ _ ⚆ ) so scary. I dont wanna have sex with my teammates…i mean one of them wouldn’t be so bad but he shall remain nameless for the sake of everyone’s sanity…or maybe just becuz I’m a coward and there’s absolutely no point if he’s not one of the 8 idiots I have to have dream smex with GROSS. Well I suppose I don’t have to but its a dream, man, I mean it’ll probly happen cuz I bet ppl are really horny in dreams cuz like the wet dream thing right? I mean, it seems like ppl’s horndogedness comes out at night (NO THAT WASN’T A PERV PUN U LECH). I guess it’s just a gut feeling…and basically I deserve the punishment after what I did to Corey.

This is so fuckn emo. But I’m pretty sure its gonna be really hard (DONT LAUGH ITS NOT FUNNY or a tumor! lmao sry/not sry. At all. Like, the opposite of sry but I don’t have a thesaurus handy and dont wanna download another stupid app.) Anywayyyyy it’s gonna be hard to cook the bacon n gravy with Seidō boys (LMFAO U GET IT, BACON IS THE COCK AND GRAVY IS THE CUM hahahahahah). Like, painful in the kokoro. Even if u think my kokoro is a tiny, blackened icy diamond, it still feels things, and altho I dont think Raven will let me be raped or hurt I just rly dont like the idea of fuckn some1 I have to see on a regular basis. I suppose they won’t remember it anyway? Ive no idea. And its a dream, so I doubt it’ll make much sense, and I rly dont think it’ll even ocurr to me to say no. Oh god, but what if I’m the one that hits on the other guy? Erghhh…I mean generally speaking the guys here r kinda hot except No Pudding-senpai but he’s got a good personality so u know, its not like im saying he’s gross or anything. Like, imagine u have sex in a dream, it just happens, right? U either like it or not, but theres not a whole lot of thought going into the process, unless that’s the actual thiing you’re hung up on. Like foreplay anxiety or sumthing LOL.

I guess it’ll be useful for haviing sex IRL. EXCEPT for me this is sex IRL - did I mention my dream tests are real? That is….whatever happens in the dream tests happens IRL to my body. So….I’ll wake up with cum n stuff if I have sex. Hopefully condoms will be used! But there’s no stds in dreams…altho that’s confusing. This whole thing is fucked up. I dont know what the test itself will be - Raven said its a different test for each dream and I have no preparation other than to know everything in the dream is real, and every decision I make will affect reality. Why this has to happen in dreams, I dont know. But I imagine going from bed to bed in Hotel Seidōfornia isn’t a great way of making friends here or impressing the Boss. And it’d probably spread crabs or sumthing. THE CRABS BETTER NOT BE IN A TANUKI-SENPAI DREAM OMFG. ∴(O艸O★)

I guess….if it were a certain sum1 I have a pretty good idea of what I’d wanna do but u know it’s hard to think abt it when I can’t do anything with him. Like it’s getting worse every day and it’s really pissing me off that I can’t do anything abt it and it’s only the beginning of the school year and already I’m this fuckn horny? And don’t u dare ask who it is cuz it’s rly embarrassing and if u remind me it’s just annoying as fuck I can’t touch him ARGH! ┻━┻ ヘ╰( •̀ε•́ ╰). God I’m getting as bad as u, Maru.

Oh so I was checkin out sum toys online - JAPANESE PPL R SCARY with their bdsm stuff and…toilet stuff-i mean who actually does that…um, uh, you know…insertion stuff? Not like I’d ever be interested in that or anything, becuz I defo am not. I mean, totally uninterested. Like it’s not on my radar. It’s like, on my nothing radar, you know the radar thats under the gaydar? (ok so maybe ur diary entry made me a bit interested but this was purely for the sake of curiousity, not like I’d actually buy anything. Yet. I mean, maybe later, like when im incredibly desperate for something besides lame dreamsmex.)

ANYWAYS that made me get a bit on the warmish side so I started wurking a bit (wanking + lurking on porn websites = wurking, Taiga (I’ll get to him in a minute) and I used to call it that becuz it feels sketchy lechy when u look at porn ( *’ω’* ) - I WASH MY HANDS so don’t look at me that way, I know u do it 2, every1 does it). And I thot I’d do sumthing useful for a change and search 4 poems to write an essay on…and I like this one, but maybe it’s too horndoggety for Smexay-sensei? MUAHAHAHAHAHA I bet it’d make him blush if I volunteer to read it out loud LOL and make some fake fuck-me eyes at him. I know what my eyes look like, what they can do to guys (ц｀ω´ц*) so it’d be fun to get him all hot and bothered. Anyway check out my smexalicious poem:

 

> Enthralled
> 
> By Alfred Bryan (1871–1958)
> 
> Teach me to sin—
> 
> In love’s forbidden ways,
> 
> For you can make all passion pure;
> 
> The magic lure of your sweet eyes
> 
> Each shape of sin makes virtue praise. 5
> 
> Teach me to sin—
> 
> Enslave me to your wanton charms,
> 
> Crush me in your velvet arms
> 
> And make me, make me love you.
> 
> Make me fire your blood with new desire, 10
> 
> And make me kiss you—lip and limb,
> 
> Till senses reel and pulses swim.
> 
> Aye! even if you hate me,
> 
> Teach me to sin.

It was in T. R. Smith, comp. Poetica Erotica: Rare and Curious Amatory Verse. 1921–22. Lol thank you baby jeebus for the gift of cut and paste!!!!

D’you think he’ll let me use it? I bet he’ll say it’s “inappropriate” for kids. I guess it just shows u how stupid horny I am.

Ok so to answer one of ur questions, Aomine is like a frenemy of my friend Taiga who I met when we lived in LA. We played on the same basketball team, but he was crazy good, like fuckin fantastic, and pretty cute too but he’s straight. Well I guess Aomine isnt, I mean he’s bi, and he’s like maybe even better than Taiga but don’t tell Taiga that! I was invited to go to a practice game between Seirin High and Tōō Academy - Tōō is Aomine’s school and Seirin is Taiga’s. Um, maybe if u wanna go we can check out Aomine together and see who he hits on HAHAHAHAHAHA but srsly if ur over Tōjō or at least planning on looking for greener manures then maybe it’s a good idea 4 u to go with me.

Anyway I felt better after reading ur weirdass insaneinthemembrane diary from yesterday. I have to admit, its kinda nice to see there r ppl even stranger than me. Also, maybe my head was a bit closer to my ass than it should be…i feel more normal today, at least. I mean, I can tell ppl are giving me those annoyed looks for being too loud. The things Im still rly missing are Ash, wide open spaces, PRIVACY and NO INVISIBLE AVIAN NON-FRIEND.

I’m not letting Raven say anything to u this time becuz last time was just tmi for every1 and I was traumatized 4 life.

Tell me wot u think of my poem & wot ur poem’s gonna be. Or I guess I’ll see it on Monday.

I didn’t see u at dinner 2nite. Wots up with that?

I guess I’ll try and get some sleep. I hope its just sleep and not dreamsmex.

I hope I don’t get it on with Crabbon MacPubeth. Do u think he has crabs in his dream body as well as his real body? I don’t deserve that much torture!!!!!!!!!!

Srsly check out Texts from Seidō. I wanna look for a little stuffed animal tanuki, like on a keychain, and dress Pube-tono in pajamas with like a stocking cap and use the little tanuki as his teddy bear. I can just see it…oh and I need help recruiting ur Tōjō’s girlfriend to do some embroidery on the tanuki, like maybe the initials MK in a miniature handkerchief and the Pube-tono’s ----

OMFG I JUST GOT AN IDEA, MARU!!!! LIKE A REAL LIGHT BULB JUST BLEW UP IN MY HEAD!!!

How about this: we do like a little Sound of Music play with a bunch of tanukis, like the lawn gnome kind, and instead of von Trap it’s von Pube, and the name is the Sound of Tanu? And each little kid outfit could have a small crab on their shirt HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. (*≧▽≦)ﾉｼ))

I guess we don’t rly have much time for that. But it would be fun…

insincerely,

your Hippo-chan ゜+.(。´>艸<)*.☆

 

|∀･)ジ P.S. Um, we should go do something like a movie. Like sometime, u know um just u and me. But u know, like in a TortyHippo friends way. Remember I’m the hippo. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 4 Glossary & Notes
> 
> Benpi (便秘) means constipation. Benpishita-kun (便秘為る君) means Constipated-kun (my translation so i bet its wrong! I thought it's conjugated as past indicative...). I'm not a big fan of canon Furuya. ∋━o(｀∀´ *o)～→
> 
> Yes, I intentionally had Sawamura write "baby jeebus" and “manures.” 
> 
> Sawamura refers to the unlikely interspecies friendship between a tortoise named Owen and a young hippo orphan named Mzee. They became best friends but did not engage in any kind of yaoi relationship LMFAO.
> 
> I laughed too much writing about Pube-tono so it sort of degenerated after that.
> 
> Please let me know if this came out okay because I didn’t check it a millionth time the way I usually do…


	5. enter the sandcat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No other human is in my room. What will people say when they see us like this????? I mean you’re the only one I’m out to. I need to run away but I also want to hold you like a human teddy bear, which is either a kink I was previously unaware of or the result of extreme shock.
> 
> How can I be shocked if I think I’m in shock? Who am I, and where did Shinji go? I don’t want to see these things, Ei—— Sawamura. Your name is Sawamura and I can’t call you Eijun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What to say about this chapter.....The unheimliche/uncanny maybe conflicts too much with the humor and un/romance. I hope that the humor is enough to pull you out of whatever tears may start to form when some shit hits the fan at the speed of Furuya’s best pitch.

* * *

 

diary: 公然の秘密 kōzen no himitsu  
user ID: なるだ詩 narudashi  
time: 22時57分 10:57 pm  
date: 2015年4月5日(日) 5 April 2015 (Sunday)  
location: Mount Seidōntcare Yōkai Penitentiary, Cell No. 5, huddled beneath Sawamura’s sweaty sheets  
weather: clear night sky with a full moon perfect for a demonic clown silhouette

narudashi’s pic of the day: nothing cuz I’m freaking the fuck out

I just woke up. Next to you. We’re both naked. And sweaty. It doesn’t look like we did anything…of _that_ nature because nothing is sore except for my head…and my stomach is a bit queasy. I think I have a hangover. I’ve never drunk more than like 4 oz of plain rice sake and once took a sip of some girly plum sake with dessert. It was way too sweet and I nearly spit it out. Yuck that makes my stomach hurt just thinking about it WTFWTFWTFWTFWTF I think I gotta go puke-

*Back from trashcan foray* The only thing comforting about this situation is that my phone is still in one piece and no drunk selfies are in evidence. I’m checking Twitter etc and things are looking…strange. We need to talk when you wake up. I think these posts will be deleted by one or both of us, so I’m taking screenshots for evidence that we’re crazy or something else altogether.

There’s also a really awkward diary draft entry that I DO NOT REMEMBER writing. I’m not sure I should show it to you just yet. It’s kind of scary, well actually very scary, which is why I’m still huddled here beside you like a huddling-type-thingus. What huddles in English? Do you say squirrels huddle? I don’t remember that cultural shit…I just don’t know about anything anymore. If you wake up and we’re spooning don’t get the wrong idea because I’m nearly hysterical from both fear and mortification…I learned a new word lol. I had to find something to distract me from Raven and the Sandcat.

Just wanted to notify you that the American saying contains "off to greener pastures" not "off to greener manures." WHAT MAKES GREEN MANURE? Don't answer that. You're American. Why do I have to tell you about your own culture, Bakamura?????

No other _human_ is in my room. What will people say when they see us like this????? I mean you’re the only one I’m out to. I need to run away but I also want to hold you like a human teddy bear, which is either a kink I was previously unaware of or the result of extreme shock.

How can I be shocked if I think I’m in shock? Who am I, and where did Shinji go? I don’t want to see these things, Ei—— Sawamura. Your name is Sawamura and I can’t call you Eijun.

The fact that I want to is scarier than not knowing who I am or why I can see a massive bird-man sitting on the empty bed across from us, chatting upa cat (in Japanese and English…what is wrong here?) that’s bigger than a panther and has two tails. Blue and black eyes—heterochrome? That’s what Google-sensei just told me…the Sandcat’s eyes…just.. Staring at me. but empty. It’s as if two eyeball-sized holes were cut from the fabric of the night sky and inserted into a cat’s skull. Why is it a Sandcat…it makes me think of the Sandman, you know the one that Suzuki-sensei was rambling on about…he made us read the Freud paper…I think I have a copy here if it makes you feel any better —it doesn’t, it won’t, you’re unconscious, I’m hysterical, I have no idea how to get you to wake up and hug me, I’m a man but I fucking need a hug goddamnit! I can’t believe you’ve been seeing this freaky shit and aren’t rocking back and forth in a fetal position all day!

Here’s the bit I was talking about before:

_This fantastic tale begins with the childhood recollections of the student Nathaniel: in spite of his present happiness, he cannot banish the memories associated with the mysterious and terrifying death of the father he loved. On certain evenings his mother used to send the children to bed early, warning them that “the Sand-Man was coming”; and sure enough Nathaniel would not fail to hear the heavy tread of a visitor with whom his father would then be occupied that evening. When questioned about the Sand-Man, his mother, it is true, denied that such a person existed except as a form of speech; but his nurse could give him more definite information:_

_‘He is a wicked man who comes when children won’t go to bed, and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes so that they jump out of their heads all bleeding. Then he puts the eyes in a sack and carries them off to the moon to feed his children. They sit up there in their nest, and their beaks are hooked like owls’ beaks, and they use them to peck up naughty boys’ and girls’ eyes with.’_

 Seriously Freud was fucked up.

everything is fucked up sawamura, sawamura do you hear me? Where did you go inside that beautiful, idiotic head of yours?

Are you actually that beautiful? Am I actually attracted to you? I’m not sure if this is real or a nightmare. If it were a nightmare would I wonder if it’s a nightmare? If it were reality would a tengu and nekomata be there laughing at me? Is it a nightmare because I’m in love with you in this world? Is there more than one world I live in? Are there more than one Shinjis hanging around here? Is one Shinji in love with you, and the other just your tortoise? Does the real me want to be a tortoise or fucking you in your tight little ass OMFG I WANNA FUCK YOU OMFG SO SCARY 

I’m peeking out of a fold in the sheet and was forced to just duck out of sight because a big beady eye was staring straight at me. Below that a beak was opening and closing and human-ish sounds were coming out of its throat but I don’t really know what it said to me because I’m hyperventilating. Hands are too shaky to stop this motherfucking demonic autocorrect…why can’t anything just fucking WORK for a minute??? 

You’re still out cold, and your breathing is pretty shallow. You feel cold to the touch, while I’m hot and keep getting more sweaty. Please don’t be sick, Sawamura. 

Fuck this, Sawamura, you need to get up and help me here, I’m going insane, I can’t stand this bird and cat, they’re playing shogi now and I can’t open the door to get some water or take a piss, it’s locked and they laugh at me when I try to open it please please wake up Sawamura they took my clothes, all I have is you to wear, please I need your skin to wear there are no clothes for me

Fuck you, Sawamura! Wake up! You’re stronger than this! Stronger than me, or the Crab, or the Boss! Everyone knows it but you!

I’m drowning in a pool of sweat. The sweat turned into a lake just now. I can’t breathe Sawamura don’t go don’t leave me here why are you walking away stop don’t run don’t run away from me please please I need you

Raven just slapped me upside the head with his slightly terrifying feather-wing-arm. How do you even?? This bird, ugh…I shouldn’t call him that, his name isn’t Raven and I don’t know why he hasn’t told you who he really is. I mean, one look and I knew he had to be more than a spirit guide or whatever you were rambling on about in your first diary entry. He’s told me some scary-ish shit that I need to say to you in person… it’d best I don’t freak you out with this encrypted entry too much, since it does take a while to decrypt, especially if I was cruel like in the mystery diary entry. At least the slap did me some good. Turns out I wasn’t drowning, but I did get both of us pretty sweaty and I apologize, let’s take a bath when you wake up because since it’s Sunday there’s no practice and we can take a bit longer than normal…not that I’m implying anything there! I just need a good soak and you need probably a good deal of distance from me, it’ll be so embarrassing for you when you wake up. I kind of worry about your response to this, but not too much since I’m more worried about my own sanity at the moment…

Found a poem for you that’s EVEN WORSE THAN YOURS lol. I’m too freaked out to talk about it here, it’s a bit much to even look at without running and hiding every couple stanzas. Hiding out of sheer embarrassment that a man wrote it, published it, and is famous for it. PEOPLE READ IT, SAWAMURA. It’s actually somewhat frightening in the detail it goes into about gay sex, especially the D/S kind.

Okay so don’t laugh at me, Sawamura—I made a collaborative playlist for this diary. I hacked into your accounts — it’s so easy, Sawamura, you make it so easy to take advantage of your innocence—it’s called _eijun no insei_ —and your homework is to figure out what that means (hint: it has something to do with sex, your name, and songs LMFAO). Too bad I can’t get a Spotify account, I guess it’s a Europe/US thing…but apparently you can use it still? You paid for it I assume…Hehehe there are some surprises in there that might make your current sexual frustration that much worse…I’m evil but I think you like it that way, based on the playlists you follow. A playlist called BDSM, Sawamura? I hope that’s a good thing and not something I need to take action on LMAO.

Hmm and I think I know why you have such an extensive amount of skin covered with tattoos—it’s a single design, not separate pieces, and there’s an incredible amount of detail around….um, you know, those parts…which might mean you actually like the pain. Am I right about that because that’s, well, um a good thing so…look it’s your own fault for being so sexy okay? It’s not my fault if I get a boner around you when you’re naked. Right! I’m definitely not like extremely into you or anything. I mean just because I want to lick your asshole doesn’t mean anything oh wait fuck that does mean something. Shit. I’m sorry, I should delete that, but I honestly think you’ll laugh and have a lot of fun seeing this, so who am I to come between you and your giggle fits.

Especially since your giggle fits are kinda cute. In a notverycute way, you know, like the way a tortoise thinks a baby hippo is cute. Probably. Maybe.

You’ll probably laugh anyway because there’re a ton of sappy lovey-dovey songs. BUT give me the benefit of the doubt here because I’ve been an emo lil shit pining after Hideaki; it still makes this region in my chest seize up a bit thinking of him with Haruno and Momoi. The romantic songs aren’t about you, they’re about me letting go of Hideaki - altho you can apply them to your own emo heartbreak if you like.I put in some shit about dreaming because I like Imagine Dragons and you’re having like sleep and/or mental issues that I think those songs speak to… And seriously, dude, come on. I’m gay. You should just be grateful it’s not filled with Cher and Elton John.

Maybe I contracted your sleep/mental issues. Idiocy osmosis? Dynamic duo hysteria?

Dude you’re sexy as fuck when you wake up and give me that altogether deceptively innocent “what’s the story, morning glory?” look. I think I know what “bedroom eyes” means now. My jisho didn’t do it justice. They’re your eyes, Sawamura. Goddamn you. Stop being so sexy, it’s downright intoxicating.

Wait a minute. You’re not Sawamura. Who…who are you? Your eyes are golden…but the gold is being eaten by indigo… how the hell? your hair is the same…your tats are the same…but something is missing. Speak to me, Sawamura. Don’t look at me that way. Like you’re ice cold inside, no heart beating life into your veins. Your name should be Sawamura Eijun, but there is no guts or glory in the boy in front of me.*

This isn’t sickness. This is demonic. Who are you?? What do you want from me? Hey, stop that kissing, it’s gross I don’t know you, you’re not my Eijun!!!!!!! Eijun, where are you? Come back please holy shit this is making me cry

Raven said you’ll be gone for a while. He doesn’t know when you’ll come back, since you’re off fucking some other guy as I type…truly it’s more of a cryping than typing. Cryping is when you’re crying so hard it’s nearly impossible to see your screen, and every couple seconds you have to wipe away the tears with a piece of whatever fabric is near to hand, which quickly becomes a snot rag. Case in point, my snot is all over your sheets now and I suppose you don’t deserve it, but I really really do want to just wipe all this nasty snot on your clean uniform out of pure spite.

How dare you go and fuck some other guy in a dream the moment I realize I’ve fallen for you? That fuckin harsh, Eijun. And I reserve the exFUCKINclusive right to call you that from now on.

I’ve decided that I don’t give a fuck what anyone else says, you’re mine and I’m not going to let go. I don’t even really care what you say - since it’s fairly obvious you feel the same way, I mean all the classic signs are there. I’m not THAT big of a baseball idiot.

So deep breath, I can do this. I can do this. I CAN DO THIS AND I WILL DO IT. Right right now just here yes oh fuck yesss

So…right. That was nice. Kisses are actually, not so bad I guess. Not that I was expecting something terrible or anything WOAH WTF MAN SO HANDSY just a sec there, wait a sec. I know you’re horny and doing it with some other FUCKING KUSOYARŌ right now…but you know, I think you actually do know, and can see or sense me somehow, that I’m here with you…and even if you aren’t, I’m going to make you realize it’s me that’s inside of you, and when you return to your senses, or both of us wake up from this nightmare/wet dream, it’ll be me leaking out of you and not him. Whoever he is, I’m going to fucking brain him with an axe, I swear.

I don’t suppose you’ll tell me who it is when you wake up? I promise I’ll leave him with the ability to eat and breathe. The limbs aren’t particularly necessary, though.

I told you I don’t share, but for your sake, I suppose I don’t mind making sure I’m having sex with you every night so as to keep you safe. How that will happen, I’m not sure. Oh, your “Raven” unfriend just decided to be the biggest avian cockblocker in history by whispering in my ear that he and Aomineko have placed a spell on the dorm. GROSS RAVEN DON’T LICK MY EAR I SWEAR I WILL CUT YOU

Ok I’m about to sign off here because I really just need to make sure you’re safe and know that I’m there with you, even if you think it’s okay right now in your dream state, I know you’ll feel terrible tomorrow. You’re not a slut, Eijun, and I’ll make sure you know that by kissing every inch of your skin and FINALLY I CAN JUST GO AT IT FUCK YES that asshole omg you have not idea how much I’ve wanted my tongue in it

WOW. Did I really? Just? Yes I typed that…wow.

This will be interesting for you to read when you wake up. Shit you’re starting to moan and that’s not a moan for me so fuck this. You’re mine and I’m going to make sure you cum because of my voice, my kiss, my everything. I refuse to leave anything for him. So what if you have to do this test. I don’t care. You’re in a Kanemaru atom now whether either of us likes it or not.

I suppose this is like phantom double penetration? Shroedinger’s cock? Lol that was terrible…dude I need something to laugh about so I don’t cum in like 2 seconds which, oh god sorry about that.

* * *

  **Chapter 5 General Notes**

The full text of Freud's freaky-ass paper excerpt is here:

  
The Sand-Man

by E. T .A. Hoffmann  
  
A summary included in Sigmund Freud's essay, "The Uncanny."  
  
This fantastic tale begins with the childhood recollections of the student Nathaniel: in spite of his present happiness, he cannot banish the memories associated with the mysterious and terrifying death of the father he loved. On certain evenings his mother used to send the children to bed early, warning them that "the Sand-Man was coming"; and sure enough Nathaniel would not fail to hear the heavy tread of a visitor with whom his father would then be occupied that evening. When questioned about the Sand-Man, his mother, it is true, denied that such a person existed except as a form of speech; but his nurse could give him more definite information: "He is a wicked man who comes when children won't go to bed, and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes so that they jump out of their heads all bleeding. Then he puts the eyes in a sack and carries them off to the moon to feed his children. They sit up there in their nest, and their beaks are hooked like owls' beaks, and they use them to peck up naughty boys' and girls' eyes with."  
  
Although little Nathaniel was sensible and old enough not to believe in such gruesome attributes to the figure of the Sand-Man, yet the dread of him became fixed in his breast. He determined to find out what the Sand-Man looked like; and one evening, when the Sand-Man was again expected, he hid himself in his father's study. He recognized the visitor as the lawyer Coppelius, a repulsive person of whom the children were frightened when he occasionally came to a meal; and he now identified this Coppelius with the dreaded Sand-Man. Concerning the rest of the scene, Hoffmann already leaves us in doubt whether we are witnessing the first delirium of the panic-stricken boy, or a succession of events which are to be regarded in the story as being real. His father and the guest begin to busy themselves at a hearth with glowing flames. The little eavesdropper hears Coppelius call out, "here with your eyes!" and betrays himself by screaming aloud; Coppelius seizes him and is about to drop grains of red-hot coal out of the fire into his eyes, so as to cast them out on to the hearth. His father begs him off and saves his eyes. After this the boy falls into a deep swoon; and a long illness followed upon his experience. Those who lean towards a rationalistic interpretation of the Sand-Man will not fail to recognize in the child's phantasy the continued influence of his nurse's story. The grains of sand that are to be thrown into the child's eyes turn into red-hot grains of coal out of the flames; and in both cases they are meant to make his eyes jump out. In the course of another visit of the Sand-Man's, a year later, his father was killed in his study by an explosion. The lawyer Coppelius vanished from the place without leaving a trace behind.

Nathaniel, now a student, believes that he has recognized this childhood's phantom of horror in an itinerant optician, an Italian called Giuseppe Coppola. This man had offered him barometers for sale in his university town, and when Nathaniel refused had added: "Eh, not barometers, not barometers--also got fine eyes, beautiful eyes". The student's terror was allayed on finding that the proffered eyes were only harmless spectacles, and he bought a pocket-telescope from Coppola.With its aid he looks across into Professor Spalanzani's house opposite and there spies Spalanzani's beautiful, but strangely silent and motionless daughter, Olympia. He soon falls in love with her so violently that he quite forgets his clever and sensible betrothed on her account. But Olympia was an automaton whose works Spalanzani had made, and whose eyes Coppola, the Sand-Man, had put in. The student surprises the two men quarrelling over their handiwork. The optician carries off the wooden, eyeless doll; and the mechanician, Spalanzani, takes up Olympia's bleeding eye-balls from the ground and throws them at Nathaniels' breast, saying that Coppola had stolen them from him (Nathaniel). Nathaniel succumbs to a fresh attack of madness, and in his delirium his recollection of his father's death is mingled with this new experience. He cries, "Faster-faster--faster--rings of fire-- rings of fire! Whirlabout, rings of fire--round and round! Wooden doll, ho! Lovely wooden doll, whirl about--", then falls upon the professor, Olympia's so-called father, and tries to strangle him.

Rallying from a long and serious illness, Nathaniel seemed at last to have recovered. He was going to marry his betrothed with whom he was reconciled. One day he was walking through the town and market-place, where the high tower of the Town-Hall threw its huge shadow. On the girl's suggestion they mounted the tower, leaving her brother [Lothar], who was walking with them, down below. Up there, Klara's attention is drawn to a curious object coming along the street. Mathaniel looks at this thing through Coppola's spyglass, which he finds in his pocket, and falls into a new fit of madness. Shouting out, "whirl about, my wooden doll!" he tries to fling the girl into the depths below. Her brother, brought to her side by her cries, rescues her and hastens down to safety with her. Up above, the raving man rushes round, shrieking "Rings of fire, whirl about!"--words whose origin we know. Among the people who begin to gather below there comes forward the figure of the lawyer Coppelius, suddenly returned. We may suppose it was his approach, seen through the telescope, that threw Nathaniel into his madness. People want to go up and overpower the madman, but Coppelius laughs and says, "Wait a bit; he'll come down of himself." Nathaniel suddenly stands still, catches sight of Coppelius, and with a wild shriek "Yes! Fine eyes--beautiful eyes'", flings himself down over the parapet. No sooner does he lie on the paving-stones with a shattered skull than the Sand-Man vanishes in the throng.

This short summary leaves, I think, no doubt that the feeling of something uncanny is directly attached to the figure of the Sand-Man, that is, to the idea of being robbed of one's eyes...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 5 Glossary
> 
> Insei (淫声) in this context means the somewhat pornographic screams made during sex. That’s why the playlist was updated as Eijun no Insei, one interpretation of which is Eijun’s Smexy Screams (but I think it’s better to say Moans cuz screams is a bit too smexaayyy even for me). Also it can be a Wasei pun like, Eijun’s loud and sexy but he’s not Insane or just Eijun not insane. Insei has a lot of other meanings when spelled otherwise in furigana or kanji, so don't be surprised if you look up the romaji and find things completely unrelated to sex or Eijun.
> 
> Sawamura Eijun is spelled 沢村 栄純. The meaning of the individual characters are:  
> sawa (沢) - marsh, swamp or mountain stream, valley, dale;  
> mura (村) - village;  
> ei (栄) - glory or prosperity;  
> jun (純) - innocent, chaste, naive or pure, genuine.  
> Incidentally, Jun (純) is also Beard-senpai's name.
> 
> Umm I don't remember if there are other words I forgot. Let me know if there are, or if my translations are like the sounds chubby hyenas make when they try to write in the dirt using their paws.
> 
> Hope you noticed that Kanemaru was too freaked out to realize the next day is Monday and it's actually too late for a bath.


	6. twice upon a dream

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Even though people may live very far from each other physically, very far apart in time, maybe they can speak to each other in dreams. Maybe they can even love each other, even if they are just boys who aren’t supposed to love other boys.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inception, Fight Club, Groundhog Day, Maleficent, and The Neverending Story continue their monster mashup in a five cheese whole crack flour pizza with cheese stuffed crust, dusted of course with fresh crackesan. Poor Emo-chan is served non-FDA approved Aoblue cheese with terrible moldy crackamilk biscuits along with NON-ORGANIC (oh the cruel horror) day-old reconstituted crackajuice.  
> Okay, real summary: Time skip, two years have passed. Further tears are shed by my emo-self as we discover that the previous chapters were all a figment of Hippo-chan’s rather lonely imagination. He has vomit issues and suspicions of his teammates getting gay over him. I parody baseball trick masters. Okumura is like a foreshadow banana cream pie. I cut up this chapter in two parts with the very dirty sex in Ch 7. Um, Aomine's ship and our Kiseki no Sedei friends are up next, I guess in terms of chapter suspense it should begin in Ch 8 (oh, the pain, the suffering I must go through!).  
> Sex warnings: I have a bdsm pic of Aomine on Pinterest that may be illegal in 39 states and gives you a general sense of the type of sex I am prone to write. BUT I am making the utmost effort to restrain my natural kinky propensity for the sake of Kanesawa.  
> I find myself requesting aid from an apologetic Kaomoji-tama once more. ｍ(｡≧~≦｡)ｍ. This was an incredibly difficult chapter to write, since it signals the story shift I’ve been so excited but also sad about. I hate for characters to be in pain. YAY FOR INCEPTION OMFG I LOVE DREAMS AND ANYTHING THAT GIVES ME THE HEEBY-JEEBIES. Also I was very sick while imagining, writing, typing, and uploading this. Maybe that’s why there are descriptions of vomiting here? I am slowly getting better, but it’s not pretty and Kanesawa/tanuki pranks/naked Aomine is about the only thing that’s halfway interesting to me right now. I have some epic homemade pranks I’m dying to include. The playlist name was adjusted to make more sense in Japanese and less a English/Japanese language mashup pun.  
> Clarification: In this scene, Okumura is allowed to catch with Eijun, for practice, but of course not on first string yet.
> 
> Uhhh there are errors but blame them on Sawamura plz.

* * *

 

First off, I’d like to share something (maybe boring) that won’t make one or both us cry. It’s given me courage and a tiny amount of hope that I will possibly survive long enough to read this diary to you in person.It’s also made me believe that maybe I’m not entirely crazy, even if I turn out to be the boy who plays a lame role as tragic but expendable bit-part character.

What I tell you now actually happened - in any and perhaps every poem universe. The following is not designed as a script for a made-for-TV matinee movie. It’s a true story about two men separated by five centuries, two languages, two continents, and two poems, each similar but not quite the same.

First is a man called Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had a daydream in 1797 on a summer day in a farm near the British town of Exmoor. He’d just begun to read a non-fiction history book, when he fell asleep almost immediately. The section he’d read just before nodding off described a man from ancient Persia called Kubla Khan. Kubla Khan was an Ottoman emperor made famous in the West by Marco Polo (who traveled from Europe to Asia between 1271 to 1295 AD). In Samuel’s dream, the words on the pages of his book began to sprout and grow like a living thing. Asleep, he saw realistic, vivid images of Kubla Khan’s magnificent palace along with words describing them. After a couple hours, he woke up and was completely, utterly sure that in his dream he’d created an extraordinary, detailed 300-line poem called "Kubla Kahn" (presumably Kubla was an important character in Samuel’s dream). He tried to write the poem down, but his smartphone buzzed with a tweet (LOL that part’s not true). While he was writing, someone interrupted him, and when he tried to finish writing down the poem, all he had left were vague images that made only 50 lines but were nonetheless very beautiful. He called it "Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment” and you can read it for yourself if you like.

Now let’s talk about what’s in the poem, Kubla Khan and his palace, who was also a very real person that lived, loved, and died just as you and I will do (at least, you will do). Years after Samuel lived, translators discovered some information about Kubla that Samuel had never known, and nobody in Europe could have known until the early nineteenth century (two before ours). Kubla (remember, he was a real person) had done something very strange, that makes sense to me but may scare you (read: freak the fuck out). You’re about to hear something like a ghost story, except these ghosts lived and probably are still out there, doing something strange in someone else’s dream (or dreams), as if they themselves are unceasing poems that will continue to hop from person to person until the end of time (please God, do NOT let it be like Being John Malkovich).

Remember I just said that Samuel dreamed of Kubla (who lived in the late thirteenth century) and he wrote his dream-poem in 1797 AD (the late eighteenth century). That was published in 1816 AD (the nineteenth century). Then, about two decades after he published Kubla Khan, Europeans got a hold of the translation of an ancient Persian book called the Compendium of Histories by Rashid al-Din. The Compendium of (Persian) Histories (since, to one person/people, history is really just about you/yours and not how others look at you) was published in the fourteenth century (1300-1400 AD). There are only small bits of the Compendium left, but there is a certain line written by a descendent of Kublai (the Persian spelling of Kubla), Ghazan Mahmud. It reads, “East of Shang-tu, Kublai Khan built a palace according to a plan that he had seen in a dream and retained in his memory.” There is absolutely no evidence to show that Samuel could have ever told Ghazan or Rashid to write or publish that. There is also no evidence to show that Kubla and Samuel knew each other.

However, **IF** one built a palace shown to him in a dream, and his descendent later writes that he actually did it, **AND** another made a poem about that palace, including the actual name of the person who dreamt of and built that palace, it makes logical sense to say that  **at some point Real-Kubla and Real-Samuel did cross paths in perhaps something like a Dream-Persia.** Now **who came back from the Dream-Persia** — **was it the Dream or Real Kubla** , **the Dream or Real Samuel** ? Because, **how can one dream of oneself in a dream, without anyone being a counterpart to you in a Dream-Land** ? Perhaps, Dream and Real Persia are exactly the same, but mirror images of each other?

In short:

  * A thirteenth century Persian man called Kubla dreamt of a palace and built it according to that dream after he woke up (perhaps he had met Samuel in his dream).
  * A man called Samuel dreamt of Kubla’s palace, may have met Kubla in that dream, and wrote about it in a poem five centuries after Kubla had lived in our “reality.”



That is non-fiction, with physical evidence to back it up, but some people just say it can’t be true, it doesn’t make sense, and actually is fiction. You could say that their story is just that - nothing but a story made by people that like to hear ghost stories at night beside a camp fire singing Kumbaya my lord. But the fact that these men are interconnected through dreams that span many years makes me think that the story I am telling to you is not so very improbable. Even though people may live very far from each other physically, very far apart in time, maybe they can speak to each other in dreams. Maybe they can even love each other, even if they are just boys who aren’t supposed to love other boys.

* * *

So now that you have heard a ghost story, I’ll tell you a stupid story, that also doesn’t make sense and is maybe funny. It’s a diary, like everything else in this little story, but maybe less offensive and probably has more sex. Let’s begin at the end, or at the end of the beginning, two years after the last dream-diary entry (beware, emo ahead):

If I could, I’d give this diary entry a profile, something to help you figure out when, where, and how I wrote this. Can you guess what the truth is? No, really, go ahead and guess. I bet you won’t figure it out on your own. I actually can’t give you many answers, including what I’d normally share with the person “I” used to know as Kanemaru Shinji. You’ll laugh and shake your head when I tell you that this morning I woke up in strange place at a strange time, in his arms but not the way I’d hoped it would be, in another place, at another time. I wasn’t in my/our bed—I was lying on a grass lawn that I recognised as a Seidō practice field. I was in his arms, but they were not wrapped around me tightly, as if he’d never let go. When I finally heard him yelling meaningless words in Japanese that was no longer a second language, I was jolted back from a daydream I never realized I’d fallen into. The expression on his face made me feel so nauseated I scrabbled back away from him as fast as possible. The Real-Eijun (whom I now realized I was) had never truly understood exactly that expression was - condescension, annoyance, frustration, mixed with a small amount of bromantic friendship. It was about two seconds before I lost my breakfast on a lawn that was at once familiar and terrifyingly foreign.

So I will admit to you and myself that I can’t provide you with an introductory profile for this diary. I don’t know who, what, when, where, or even if I wrote in this very lonely un-exchange diary. I don’t really have the time, patience or knowledge of how to articulate (a Dream-Eijun word) my mind-numbing pain in the proper letters, words, sentences, paragraphs or chapters. I’ll just go ahead and tell you the truth as I’ve seen it with a pair of eyes, touched with a pair of hands, and loved with a pair of hearts that for some unknown reason are still beating within a single body. My body. I’m fairly certain that my name is Sawamura Eijun, or at least part of me is.

I don’t want to share this. It hurts too much, makes absolutely no sense, and makes me cry about 95% of the time I spend typing (cryping, if you remember it, but that word is a Dream-Kanemaru word too painful for regular use). How can one daydream nearly kill a stubbornly joyful spirit that everyone, including myself, believed I’d never lose? But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here is what I’d planned on writing at the start:

My recent standard quote of every day in “reality” comes to us courtesy of Disney via Lana del Ray—

 _“I know you_  
_I walked with you once upon a dream_  
_I know you_  
_that look in your eyes is so familiar_  
_And I know it’s true_  
_that visions are seldom all they seem_  
_But if I know you_  
_I know what you’ll do_  
_you’ll love me at once_  
_the way you did once_  
_upon a dream.”_

I wish you could see how I’m laughing hysterically and crying in equal measure right now. It’s really funny how you can go through the majority of your life believing you have it all figured out. Then something unbelievable happens, an explosion of impossibility that rips apart the fabric of reality as you know it.A lightening bolt that spears your life, leaving a burning hole in your spirit that cannot be fixed, understood, or filled. Some call it a miracle, a mystery bestowed upon us by a supposedly benevolent God. Others, like myself, call it catastrophe.

Before I came to Seidō, I was an average pitcher with a more than average amount of excitement in the game of baseball as it’s played in Japan. If I’m being totally honest, I’ll go a step further and admit that my batting skills were well below average at the beginning of my first year. That’s especially true considering I was there on a baseball scholarship.

Yes, I sucked. I was green, untried, and undependable. People said that any aspect of my success was due to pure luck, that anything I did well was a fluke. I suppose that might have been true. Even though I was loud, relentlessly energetic, overly confident, and seemed to have an unquenchable thirst for the ace title, I was pretty unsure of myself. I was even unsure of how much others were sure of my modest abilities. During my first year at Seidō, I went through some drama that made me a stronger person, tempered my stubborn nature, and taught me the nature of loss and humiliation.

It was at that uncertain juncture of first and second years, that emotional transition from one team to another, that catastrophe struck. It wasn’t an earthquake, flood, death in the family or even a gross unromantic unrequited crush for Coach Frogface (Ochiai). You’ll laugh at me when I tell you that one daydream (daymare, more like) deliberately cut me apart and haphazardly stuck me back together like a puzzle whose pieces are shoved together without thought for the picture they once formed. I am now both the person looking in the mirror and the one banging their fists against the glass on the other side. So you can understand that I now question what reality and dreams actually mean. 

I understand myself as a person made of both dreams and reality, but most of the time one or the other of us act separately and writes like this to you. I am a mashup of two extremely different people, with entirely different mannerisms, family history, sexual preference, fashion sensibilities (if you can call tattoos a fashion statement), ethnicity (!!!) and, perhaps worst of all, handedness. My alter-ego (for lack of a better term) is half Japanese and ambidextrous, at once both half and double of me. If that means something, I don’t know, but my opinion is that the missing half of my Japanese “self” went into the right side of his body. Of course that doesn’t make any sense, but I did warn you in advance that would happen.

If you know anything about the “real” me (and I have no idea who, what, when, or how you and I came to be here) then you know I’m a true southpaw and not particularly bright. I do everything, especially pitching, with the left side of my body. I also don’t have much of a vocabulary in English or eloquence in the Japanese language. In his life, Dream-Eijun got to the point that he developed genuine skill with two spoken and written languages. It only took him two years, so I suppose that means his American genes gave him some kind of advantage there. He also doesn’t give a (insert curse word, I hate how he curses so much) and will use whatever hand, arm, etc to do something in the easiest way possible. That is really, painfully obvious in our pitching, batting, and classroom work.

The annoying but wonderful thing about Dream-Eijun is that he’s a third year and therefore a year older than me. That means he’s stronger, has more experience as a pitcher, realized some of our full potential, and generally more talented. He also has better flexibility, in more than just the physical sense. He’s lived through an incredible amount of upheaval in his young life. He had sex before coming to high school, lived across the world, seen so many interesting things, and experienced the death of his brother. The fact that he had a brother, and step-siblings, is something I’m jealous of, even though he misses the girls and feels bad about the way his brother died. Moving to Japan was just another challenge in a series of mountains he’d scaled and conquered since birth.

I speak of Dream-Eijun as if he is real, although he was born, raised, loved, and nearly died inside my own brain. To me, he’s only an important character in what some would call a lucid daydream. Those people would insist it’s a lucid dream even though I’d never experienced one or even tried to have a dream like that before.

How. How did this happen. I have no idea. Every night I go to sleep asking those questions and come up with no answers. Part of me wants to shy away from the supernatural, to simply go along with my life assuming that I need counselling, medication, and behavioural treatment with a psychiatrist and host of other health professionals in order to “fix” my disease of uncertainty, anxiety, and duality of thought.

Because if half of me is actually a fantasy, there’s nothing to say that all of me is isn’t just a dream, and nothing is “real.” Even scarier is the idea that I, the Sawamura Eijun that you know me as, am the “dream” Eijun inside of the “real” Eijun, and he’s dreaming of me in a thrilling (to you), horrific (everyone else), and very _real_ way. What if we are simply both Dream-Eijuns dreamt by someone altogether different, maybe someone that knows someone that looks like me?

Because what is life if not one never-ending story? We all play a role in a universal story of life, perhaps, a poem within a book. What if that book of life lies on a life bookshelf beside an infinite amount of similar but slightly different books that say the same thing? What if that infinite lifeshelf of books lies within a library of similar shelves, a library-planet? What if that library lies within a consortium, an alliance of similar libraries working towards the same goal of propagating and sharing more books, more poems, like a library-solar system? What if that goes on and on ad infinitum until there’s a group of all possible consortia, spinning in library alliance space. And that group, containing an infinite amount of library alliances, and all possible poems, are simply stanzas swirling within a massive poem itself, a poem that writes itself, composes its own verses and is sentient, a “God” or sentient poem “universe.”

What’s to say that I’m not just a single stanza in a single poem of a basic poem collection? _Am I even one of the words?_   What if I’m only a single string of furigana, or better yet, a single elementary two-part character? If I am such a character, maybe I can’t figure out which stroke I am?

What if it’s a very dangerous problem that my two-year long daydream has awoken things in my brain that are better left unknown? And that by being aware of my place in a life poem, I have some hard choices to make? Maybe the real issue at hand is that I need to figure out, to decide, and face which direction the stroke of my pen should go in. Do I write the two strokes in the “correct” directions, or do I write them in the opposite directions? What if it is possible to write my character in both directions at the same time? What if Shroedinger’s theory just means that there are mirrors of alphabetic combinations, and each poem has it’s own mirror, writing themselves without realising it, both making the same poem but not actually aware of which way they face?

I could just have a problem because dreams show us how we are two people in one mirror that can face in opposite directions, maybe by spinning like a coin does. BUT we shouldn’t actually be aware of the mirror itself or the fact that we are poems because that would cause this near hysteria of being, this terrible fear of becoming absolutely nothing. I’m honestly afraid that it’s possible for me to erase myself in a dream. If you think of me as a mirror-kanji or mirror-katakana, etc, dying in a dream would be like staring at a steamy bathroom mirror, then taking a towel and wiping off letters I’d written with my own two hands. What if my sadness and pain means that by being aware of my mirror, I am currently in the process of erasing myself, and that I have to stop this nonsense about Dream vs Real Eijuns. 

Enough of this, I’m tired of constantly worrying about what will happen next, the next time I go to sleep perchance to fall in love again and nearly die - again. I can’t honestly figure out if this is happening right now or in the past. Let’s just say it’s the “past” for now, otherwise you and I both will be incredibly confused (and I don’t need anymore confusion for today).

Let’s suppose that after I journeyed down that long and rather annoying soliloquy I’d later write in this diary, I tossed the mirror crap out of my head for a moment (because time has no meaning in a dream).

I shook my head in horror as I realized I’d been staring at Miyuki for a while, but for reasons completely unrelated to baseball. I didn’t even know how long I’d been checking him out, absently wondering what his naked ass would feel like under my exploring fingertips. I frowned, clenched my fist around the ball in my hand. I hated this. I hated that I wasn’t thinking about kissing and touching Haruno, but about someone whose initials started with M and ended with K (a bad sign when I used the English alphabet unconsciously). I hated the way people around me were smirking like they knew what I was thinking, why my face felt hotter than a furnace. As if they knew me. As if I knew myself. I felt humiliated and furious.

Sir Smirksalotmore finally noticed that people around him were sniggering. I tensed, feeling for all the world like a deer caught in the headlights (a flashy pimped out ride, to be sure), as he called out to my nemesis/frenemy Furuya. My eyes darted from side to side, silently pleading for help from everyone around me. Even Okumura seemed interested in seeing how this would play out. I opened my mouth to object as Miyuki absently patted Furuya on the shoulder and told him to go get some water (that was never a good sign, in my opinion). But nothing came out, as if the Crab’s beady eyes had hypnotised me and told me not to speak. Remembering that Dream-Eijun had once played merciless tricks on my sexy senpai (oh for fuckssake, Eijun) I had to cover my mouth so as not to let a little inappropriate giggle out - that would obviously ruin my chance to laugh at the Crab if he tried to flirt. 

Supposedgenius Crabcher-senpai swaggered across the bullpen and stood a little bit too close for comfort as he took off his glasses and wiped the sweat away from around his eyes with a forearm. Embarrassed at the direction this was going, I thought, _So what if his eyes aren’t beady and nothing at all like a crab’s. Doesn’t mean a thing to me._ Then he leaned in, within kissing distance, and I couldn’t help but jerk my head back. Undeterred by my reaction, he just smirked a little in what I assumed what self-satisfaction. Whether in dreams or reality, our captain was a competitive and territorial crab, never satisfied until he’d brought his opponent to his knees.

At that thought, I trembled a little and had to bite my lower lip in order not to laugh in my senpai’s somewhat comically sexy face (he’s not sexy, I swear on Pube-tono’s rather large balls!). Despite my desperate attempts to make light of the situation, the idiotic metaphor about bringing me to my knees had me veering into unsafe territory.I started taking shallow, shaky breaths as he advanced a fraction closer. Then he had to make me all lightheaded and slightly (just slightly, I swear on Pube-tono’s mitt!) horny when he took the opportunity to check the fingernails of my left hand. I swear he must have seen my heart beating at least 180 beats per minute when he glanced up at me with a look taken straight out of a pornographic magazine. To make matters that much worse, as he dropped my hand much too slowly, his voice dipped in a completely non-sexy manner as he said in a stage whisper, “If you want to catch my balls, just say so.”

I gulped and blinked a few times in confusion. Since when had my senpai invested so much time and thought into seducing a baseball idiot from his own club, especially someone like Sawamura Eijun? Everyone knew the Crab had some fun outside of the club, but not enough to justify the rumours that he had a line of people waiting outside his door while he had sex with the latest flavour of the week. You have to admit that there were few people who could put up with his emotional constipation and all-consuming interest in baseball. I counted myself among those who found him attractive (which I probably had to admit had been there since I first saw him) but irritating enough to not let his physical attributes outweigh the fact that he was kind of a jerk.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Furuya shooting a slightly demonic glare in our general direction, an angry blue aura emanating from his whole body. I glanced between the pitcher and catcher, who both seemed now to be engaged in a stare-off contest to the death _(why don’t I get them some pistols and Stetson hats?)_. I stepped back quickly, bowed low and mumbled, “I’m very sorry to waste your time, Miyuki-senpai.” I knew that would surprise everyone watching, but it had been too embarrassing and confusing to stay and endure another moment of the Crab’s overdeveloped sense of sexual magnetism and superiority. I jogged over to Okumura _(excuse, what excuse do I give him, Eijun???)_ , who had apparently begun shooting Capt. McCrabsson a death glare of his own, for an entirely different reason.

The first year always resented other people taking up time that he could catch with me. He was a fairly skilled catcher, especially for a first year, and I liked it (just a little) when he turned his intense concentration on me .The only problem was that his observational skills had caught on to the subtle differences in my personality traits from the moment he saw me puke and land myself in the infirmary. Of course, after the first puking incident, I saw Okumura seated in the chair Kanemaru should have occupied, I had dry heaves. That time, Okumura was prepared with a garbage can as if he’d anticipated my fear and reactions. These days, Okumura was my rock, not Kanemaru, and not in a romantic way - something I welcomed.

I shook my head and returned to the “present.” I wasn’t aware how my anxiety about the strange behavior of my senpai and frenemy had let me slip easily into Dream-Eijun mode. Okumura must have realized this when I began to unconsciously calm myself down with a little trick I’d invented while sitting on the bus on the way to and from a tiny elementary school on the reservation. There’s nothing like a half an hour of empty time to teach yourself skills you’d never use in real life. Since the ride was bumpy and I had no friends to talk to, my baseball tricks were easy to perform in almost any situation, regardless of what I stood on.

When bored or anxious, Dream-Eijun did this stupid sort of hacky sack baseball trick by sliding a ball (any kind would do) up my thumb, across the back of my fingers towards my pinkie, up the back of my hand, then inwardly twisting my forearm till it reached the outer point of my elbow. The same arm twisted outward to let the ball fall back down to the inside of my wrist and slide up my thumb, etc. That continued until I felt like transferring the ball to my opposite hand with a little pop up off the back of my first hand, which landed softly on my opposite thumb, beginning the cycle anew in a seamless loop.The fact that I didn’t have to watch the ball and that the pace quickened as I became more emotional (anxious, excited, sad, etc) probably concerned Okumura. Considering the dangers of letting everyone know I could use both sides of my body equally, he stepped forward to take the ball away from me. At that point the ball had become slightly blurry as I thought about how I was doing something stupid yet instinctual and thus couldn’t stop even if I wanted to.

The earnest frown of concentration he directed at the ball made me giggle loudly—that was all Real-Eijun and I slowed the ball down until it appeared like it would almost fall. It was really hilarious to see a little gleam of light in Okumura’s eyes when he thought he had a chance at taking it away without some act of God or my permission. He probably didn’t know he had less chance of winning a beauty pageant with Miyuki in the line-up. I almost really dropped the ball when I realized how my sexuality kept shifting closer to Dream-Eijun’s with every moment spent in my senpai’s company. I caught the tanuki’s eye and saw frank jealousy there. It scared the shit out of me. I felt Okumura’s fingers brush against mine and I actually shivered—I’m sure it was noticeable to all within 10 feet (it seemed like the whole first string was within spitting distance by now). Okumura’s attention was still fixed on the ball where it rolled in a lazy circle around the back of my hand, until he suddenly made to snatch the ball as it hovered briefly over my left thumb. Without realising what I was doing, I rolled the ball up my chest in a practiced, sinuous motion. This was something Dream-Eijun could do in his sleep; I wasn’t in any way showing off. But Okumura actually pouted as I backed away from him with a bright, mischievous smile and turned abruptly, ball clutched beneath my chin as I zigzagged between our onlookers.

I feigned a glance back to see if the first year was running after me, and my grin grew wider as I saw that he had, expression furious and maybe blushing a little. I picked up the pace and dodged among the rest of the team that remained focused on the right thing, diligently batting, fielding, etc with single-minded fervour. Every few minutes, I’d check to see if my catcher was still following, and I couldn’t help but shout in triumph in a Real-Eijun way as his face became progressively more red. I could tell he was gradually losing stamina, so I started occasionally leaping easily over equipment and running backwards without checking what was behind me _Potential excuse to Boss: running and jumping are in everyone's regimen_.

There are certain skills you develop as a tracker in a high desert decorated with barbed wire fences (sometimes electric), generous quantities of rattlesnakes, and wide-eyed hares that one must be very quiet to pet without them getting spooked or even noticing. So it was a natural reflex for Dream-Eijun to leap up suddenly as if playing catch around a barbed wire fence, touch the ground softly as if trying not to alert baby hares to my presence, and avoid my teammates as one would quickly jump out of the range of a rattlesnake family disturbed from their midday nap.

Tracking is only possible by developing “splatter vision” or eyesight that sees in all directions instead of in a narrow forward-facing band. When I felt like using splatter vision, I could see several of my senpai trying to corner me in my peripheral vision - which, for a tracker, is everywhere with a small side to side head movement (once you develop the skill well enough). It was so easy for Dream-Eijun to avoid that group while staying well ahead of Okumura that I had time to pause and climb/leap up the top of an equipment shed to stretch and take a cat nap.

Unfortunately, both Eijuns are prone to snoring, so only about ten minutes had passed before I was disturbed by a group of my teammates - some glaring, some giggling and a few maybe a little turned on. I didn’t blush when I realized it was the three I’d noticed before, since I had absolutely zero interest in anyone besides one of the glaring boys that was yelling something including the words, “baka, teme, kuso, yarō” and several others that made some of his senpai and kōhai wince. Both Dream and Real versions of the person some call Sawamura Eijun realized belatedly that a boy that looked but did not sound like Kanemaru Shinji was angry because he was just angry and not for a reason that might involve sloppy French kisses and rabid make-up sex.

At that moment I realized that Dream-Eijun and Real-Eijun were one and the same, a person who had fallen in love with a hallucination and had been a supremely pathetic fool for expecting a hallucination to appear out of thin air and speak to me with loving concern and maybe a funny joke or two. Combined Eijun blanched and I closed my eyes as puke-sign reared its ugly head. I felt sickeningly warm saliva fill my mouth just in time to slide down to the eaves before vomiting mostly water over the side of the roof. I continued to dry heave so violently that I heard dead silence behind me as someone rushed down the ladder, then returned to force fresh water into my mouth.

I don’t know or particularly care who my benefactor was. I let the person wipe away puke from the corner of my mouth with what felt like a jersey. _Oh, how sweet, a real person is touching me_. I just hoped that no one had picked up on the reason I showed fairly obvious signs of having a loved one torn away from me relentlessly, day after heart-wrenching day.

For a couple minutes, I allowed myself to stare up at the empty sky devoid of romanticism, remembering that time/place when Shinji had coaxed me into accompanying him on a secret walk outside of the school grounds. It had been a cold, clear night, and he had insisted we hold hands as he tried to teach me the different constellations you can see in Japan that you couldn’t quite catch at the latitude and longitude where I lived as a child. Since everyone was asleep, and we were far from the dorms, I let him do extremely naughty things to me under a blanket without fear people would hear the very loud insei I made whenever Shinji touched me deep down, just right, and lit me up like a display of festival fireworks. Coincidentally, that was the night he sort of “proposed” to me, as a way to promise we’d stay together and to let him stay sane if I died in a dream. _I’m sorry, Shinji_ , I whispered (very melodramatically, l’d say). I guess I did die in a dream, but it was suicide, not coincidence, murder, or destiny. Because tonight, this night, that night, the night I puked every last diamond shard of pain from my soul, the part of me that loved Shinji shriveled to dust, and it was okay to call him Kanemaru again.

I was/am/will always be crying as I became sensible of the mess covering a large swathe of the ground beneath my swollen and tear-stained face, because I’d finally realized that I couldn’t go on succumbing to these mini heart attacks. I decided to keep Dream-Eijun and toss the knowledge of Dream-Kanemaru down the toilet along with the other projectile vomit I’d endured from his indifference, that sense of nothing that hurt no one else but seemed to be targeted towards me in particular.

It was hard, but also surprisingly easy to cut off that part of my heart with a nearly audible snip. Within the sight of everyone watching, which was probably the whole first string, our managers, and maybe Takashima-san, I drew off from around my head a gold chain strung with a golden ring carved with the head of a roaring lion that I’d worn for two days before I’d returned from my daymare. I had clutched at it possessively ever since when I thought no one was looking (later, they admitted they called me “My Precious” before I got rid of the ring that ruled my mood). I bet everyone had seen it. Including my never-lover. I stared at it for a moment, absently admiring the artistry required to duplicate the real version of an exquisite male/yang lion dog, the kind with an open mouth to ward off evil spirits. Shinji had decided unilaterally to claim the male lion and ever so graciously assigned me the female. However, he gave me the male lion ring because he said it would protect me, and took the female lion ring because he said it would keep me close to him. What a stupid poet that never lived!

I’d never seen the person I knew as Kanemaru Shinji, who had given me the wedding band substitute in a dream, wear its match. That ring was a lion whose mouth was closed to keep good spirits in. The rings fit together both as two parts of a larger gold ring, symbolic of our union and how we fit perfectly together in something like a Kanemaru atom. The rings were symbols of life itself, the need for relationship in everything, and that a pair like ours supposedly cannot be divided. The person who had worn the other ring in my vivid daymare was, in true reality, just the memory of a hallucination of a phantom that never existed. The real Kanemaru Shinji had never imagined it was possible to make a ring like that and give it to me with a promise that he’d never stop loving me. It was obvious to me that the “person” I loved had never lived in the flesh, never would, and it was useless to pine after the dying whisper of a dream of a poem that was never written or was even possible to write.

However I’d received this phantom ring, I didn’t need it anymore. So I didn’t cry when I threw it into the vomit pile beneath me. I don’t know if anyone said “ooh” or “aah” when I leapt off the roof and began to shovel the sickening trash into a rubbish bin. I did know that there was such complete and utter silence at dinner that Harucchi, followed quickly by Furuya, started crying on my behalf. Even that couldn’t make me laugh, although it did help to break the ice and earned me a suffocating headlock from Kuramochi.

After that supremely melodramatic episode, I became both something of a legend for my emotional outbursts, (useless) tricks and the volume of puke I could spew within the span of two minutes.It was a long time before I could act like the same old energetic Bakamura again, albeit with more knowledge under my belt and secret pitches I planned on rockin’ out courtesy of a daymare and Okumura (with my guns out, of course). We planned on using them when we faced a particularly hard opponent in the last few moments of an important game, the kind in which Furuya’s staminarol had just fizzled out. My new and improved mantra, Eijun 3.0 was:

  * kill Inajitsu,
  * take Kōshien,
  * kill self.



I would make Inajitsu feel the worst kind of humiliating loss by pulling out some wicked right-handed pitches, forcing them to kneel at Seidō’s feet. On behalf of my senpai, whom I’d failed before, I would help Seidō win Kōshien with a set of insane pitch grips I’d honed in a daydream but still knew in my muscle memory. On behalf of the Shinji I once knew and betrayed, the Corey I’d made die in a car crash, I’d kill myself, post-Kōshien victory. The finer points of suicide were something I worked on a little bit at a time, researching the most painful methods—since I’m nothing if not a competitive sort of crustacean (I’d prefer lobster, if you please, because I’ve been told I taste quite good. Also, crab is a very common meat generally whose cheap faux replacement is combined with sugar and food colouring to make it appear like the real thing. Hmmm…sound like anyone familiar?).

* * *

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 6 Glossary
> 
> Shisa (シーサー, shīsā, shiisaa) or lion dogs have a long history in Japan. There were never really any lions in Japan, so these figures are purely mythological in nature. Basically, they are a twin pair of lion statues from Okinawan mythology which at one point picked up some dog characteristics (I won’t go into the details) and are now lion ward statues. They only exist in relation to each other, because yang must be tempered with yin to complete a whole, the perfect circle of relationship. Typically they protect the front entrance or roof of a building, especially Shinto shrines. The “male” or yang lion dog has an open mouth designed to roar as he keeps bad spirits at bay, he sits on the left; his partner the “female” or yin statue sits on the right side of an entrance, mouth closed to keep in good spirits. They are called shiisaa (by Okinawans), shisa, and shīsā, although I’ve found a jisho (dictionary) that lists a shisaa as the male. In Okinawa the lion dogs are quite famous for obvious reasons, sold in tourist traps, made of anything, and can look more like chibis than fierce statues symbolic of protection. [OMFG I’M CRYING! (as you can tell I do that rather often) KANEMARU! U DAMN YANG TURD, Y U SO MEAN TO POOR YIN BABY EIJUN!!?? *Chucks iron shisaa at Kanemaru*]  
> Also explained in chapter 5 but wth:
> 
> Insei (淫声) in this context means the somewhat pornographic screams made during sex. That’s why the playlist is now called Eijun no Insei, one interpretation of which is Eijun’s Smexy Screams (but I think it’s better to say Moans cuz screams is a bit too smexaayyy even for me). Also it can be a Wasei pun like, Eijun’s loud and sexy but he’s not Insane.
> 
> Any other words I need to explain? I love curse words so ask me what lovely epithets Kanemaru could have thrown at his un-lover!
> 
> General Notes
> 
> Anyone from the Pacific NW will understand the organic food joke. Eating regular food of any sort that is not entirely organic is basically a cardinal sin there. You actually feel guilty when you don’t buy organic, locally grown lettuce from farmer’s markets and free-range steak from buffalos raised in Hilton hotel barns and ranges the size of California. Not that I don’t love that buffalo steak. Or begrudge them their range. I probably feel the most guilty, as it pains me to kill my sister, the Black Widow spider.
> 
> Paragraphs 3 to 5 are paraphrased from a short non-fiction essay by Jorge Luis Borges called _Coleridge’s Dream._ The weird stuff about Coleridge and Kahn meeting and/or loving each other is pure crack (or is it? your guess is as good as mine).
> 
> Tanukis in Japan are famous for their massive balls. I'M NOT KIDDING. They can like make boats with them and fend off enemies, etc. All ceramic, etc depictions of the debu (chubby) tanus include balls that are clearly visible. EVEN THE CUTE ONES. Which begs the question, how large are Tanuki Kazuya's? Cause Eijun doesn't want to catch them (see the Crab's faux-pinterest board for explanation).
> 
> Splatter vision is a real skill that you, too, can develop. It's easier if you start tracking as like a four year old though. See Tom Brown's _Field Guide to Nature Observation and Tracking_.
> 
> Everything referred to in this chapter is included on my nsfw pinterest board; there's also one devoted completely to the Crab. Yay for addictive social media…yeh…meh.  
> As for the story:  
> Things get better, like everything in real life does after a long spell of hard rain. Whether you find a rainbow (or a leprechaun lol) is always your choice, when you're able see it from your vantage point. Sometimes seeing a rainbow requires moving so that you can see it, because you know it’s there, because it has to be, if only just to make the rain a little more bearable. I mention the latter only based on personal experience.  
> Also:  
> Reality is about perception, and so is pain. I often tell myself that something is only painful if I think it is so. It’s actually pretty helpful. There is no spoon! Also, life is pain, princess! LMFAO


	7. in the year of our lord eijun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [okay so don't go looking for rhyme or reason in this or chasing waterfalls at all,please cause that's a lame song and my commentary is also super lame]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was planned as the introduction to a megachapter called _aomine, meet aonekomata_. But I'm kind of tired of waiting for Kanemaru to pull his head out of his (admittedly cute) ass. Last night I pulled this out of my own [insert word that will make you chuckle] on a whim cuz I do most everything on whims. Then I remembered how cleaning up my html is not my forte. That lack of skill only gets worse the more some sort of mutant virus makes me constantly nauseated and screws with my inner ear-- that controls my sense of balance and thus eyesight. Which makes me think the .md file extension is worth learning how to use. Let me just say that a certain paragraph tag is now burned into my retinas.
> 
> This is where perfectionism ruins everything. Paragraph html, of all things!!! *holds tantrum festival*

* * *

_anno Eijun_ , or _AE_  
part of speech: adverb  
pronunciation: an·no Ei·jun \ˌa-(ˌ)nō-\ ˈā-(ˌ)zhən\  
definition: used to indicate that a time division falls within the Eijun era  
origin: this strange diary  
popularity: bottom 0.00001% of words  


Let's imagine this day lies within one of the Eijun era (ROTFLMFAO), if the last entry was day zero.

Because the days before "yesterday" were kind of on the negative side. We were so sarcastic, wrote lame 10 things lists filled with jealousy (admit it, Dream-Kanemaru!), used enough curse words to decorate the side of every seafaring vessel in Japan about twice over. We didn't seem to think about other people's needs even though we made poor attempts to say the opposite. I mean, who pranks their supposed cold-hearted senpai with nasty lice jokes (okay those were funny but still, we could've kept that to ourselves, like a sort of cute inside joke). Did I deserve the pain that followed our cruel shenanigans? Maybe not, but you know how sensitive a little hermit crab is inside its pretty shell, really soft on the inside? I think that if Miyuki was a marine crustacean of any kind, he would be a hermit crab (this is just a metaphor people!!!). I still don't think he'd be as tasty as lobster (me). Just sayin.

Then yesterday wasn't negative so much as bleak, wouldn't you say? Like my emotions weren't emotions, just meandering thoughts no one wants/ed to hear anyway. So I'll try to make everything from this day forward at least a tiny bit more positive than day zero. If you're Christian, I hope you won't mind me stealing a bit of your idea of resurrection (I mean, resurrection is pretty common, see: Harry Potter, but still…). Exiguus-san, do you mind if I use your idea to create my life numbering system? I'd just be for me, mostly for this nikki, cause I get really confused between dream and real time. So…let's say for the sake of humouring me:

Time 0 is _anno Eijun_ or _AE_ (ROTFL, as in the year of Eijun), when both Dream and Real-Eijuns kill/ed themselves as separate people, but then were/are reborn as Complete-Eijun (me! yay. I suppose that means Kanemaru was reborn….somewhere else? I think he died to me. So confusing...)

Then before anno Eijun, that's before we kill our separate selves and are resurrected into me (yay). That's time negative, time let's call _before anno Eijun_ or _BAE_. Hey you're my bae…could you be, would you be, my bae-bor? lol more like gay-bor (sorry/not sorry).

Then, after 0 anno Eijun is time positive, like 1 AE etc, but that's only for a year cause anno means year in Medieval Latin (look I do know a couple things okay, like the fact that Merriam-Webster online dictionary exists and is free to use.)

* * *

So here goes my first entry into anno Eijun:

would you like to see a very stupid assignment for english class i finished today?sad to say,i did turn it in,i had no choice because i woke up late(in the right time,in the right place).maybe it will make you laugh:lol cummings was not so bad cuz he didn't like punctuation either.[okay so don't go looking for rhyme or reason in this or chasing waterfalls at all,please cause that's a lame song and my commentary is also super lame]

commentary on a poem in the style of the poet;  
or,  
eulogy for a dream  
by sawamura eijun

**poem:**

it is at moments after i have dreamed  
by e.e. cummings

it is at moments after i have dreamed (1)  
of the rare entertainment of your eyes, (2)  
when(being fool to fancy)i have deemed (3)  
with your peculiar mouth my heart made wise; (4)  
at moments when the glassy darkness holds (5)  
the genuine apparition of your smile (6)  
(it was through tears always)and silence moulds (7)  
such strangeness as was mine a little while; (8)  
moments when my once more illustrious arms (9)  
are filled with fascination,when my breast (10)  
wears the intolerant brightness of your charms: (11)  
one pierced moment whiter than the rest (12)  
—turning from the tremendous lie of sleep (13)

**poem with commentary**

**it is at moments after i have dreamed (1)**  
[it was a daydream/mare  
dreamt by a gaki prone to idiocy,  
since i was/am the definition of baka  
to think you could ever be real;afterward  
i want(ed) to die  
without you by my side;how funny.please  
laugh;would it interest you to know some morbid  
plans post-victory,as there is no life  
without an impossible(here, in real life)  
phantom-poem that you never  
wrote/can write,though i imagine  
you might if you could only remember  
how to lose yourself in me]

 **of the rare** [raw] **entertainment of your eyes, (2)**  
[yes,i can entertain you more:your  
eyes were/are/will always be  
too beautiful to see awake,otherwise  
they’d blind everyone,and  
of course i need eyes to see you,  
(tightwhiteass)playing baseball  
the food of life(insert white kick);  
your eyes see everything  
on the field but nothing of me—it’s okay,  
don’t cry,i’ll be okay,i have to,have been;  
(sometimes wonder  
if okay is not enough)  
i do/did/will/want to hate  
you but can’t quite forget  
how you looked at me  
sometimes,like i was the sun  
but you wouldn’t mind burning]

 **when(being fool to fancy)** (3.1)  
[everyone knows i have dreams  
that are im(?)possible in real life,  
but possible in dreams;please  
just make it possible,tortoise—  
remember me,us,you can  
tie me up,i let you,wanted shibari  
eyes shut,lips,tongue,tears  
one pair,one pain,we combined  
the om and aa:  
let us laugh now  
in this place this time,since the lion  
can't roar without my mouth  
you were never loyal,  
you impotent alpha.  
i promise to stop  
thinking of promises  
since your brittle weakness  
is a living,breathing joke  
**i have deemed (3.2)**  
[i decided  
that i loved you but that  
decision was obviously very stupid,  
so then i decided to hate you instead  
it's not working out that well] 

**with your peculiar mouth my heart made wise; (4)**  
[i only ever really knew your mouth  
by tasting it for myself,as  
often as possible,in every way  
possible;your mouth taught me  
the ways of sin,oh how sinful  
you could/can be if you cho/ose/d  
to do so once/evermore;  
remember ginsberg?he doesn't  
remember you in this form,  
we laugh at your sour  
expression like some sad  
virgin without a mouth  
sweet from real sugar—  
if someone else takes it i will  
surely cut them so be careful,  
if we're still tied you'll also bleed  
(your heart,our heart,one and the same)];

 **at moments when the glassy darkness holds (5)**  
[i want to hold you(awake or asleep),but only  
the dark sleepy regions of my brain can  
hold you now;sometimes i  
look at the mirror and wonder  
if you’re still there,on the other side  
in dream-seidō,maybe  
pulling another prank on the crab;  
what are you doing  
over there?is it true  
that you’re really just a double-lover,a  
mirror image,an enantiomer,  
someone that is real to yourself but  
a dream to me,a dream i can never  
touch again unless you dream of me?  
or are you just an e.e. cummings  
poem commentary no one(not you)  
will read except a very bored sensei?]

 **the genuine apparition of your smile (6)**  
[of course it was all a dream;i tell  
myself that constantly but never  
really succeed,the dream of you  
is the only thing that keeps me alive;will you  
please just smile at me the way you used to,  
when you pulled a prank on our poor  
unsuspecting senpai;you have no idea  
how hard it is not to laugh  
in his crabby face sometimes god i miss  
your laugh;if i could hold just one  
of your genuine laughs,i’d pitch it to  
sir smirksalot and watch him smile  
like a real tanuki,minus massive balls]

 **(it was through tears always) (7.1)**  
[i won't lie here,i don't want to so i'll admit  
i cry about you on average,maybe  
two hours daily,it's not like i mind you  
torturing me  
since they grumble and say  
it's just sniffles(in my nightmares,  
the kind that never go away and i remember  
but can’t change)it probably annoys  
everyone;if only to save everyone else  
in room5 will you remember me,stop  
letting me cry even though i promised  
myself not to;i cut you out from my heart  
with a knife but you remain like a stubborn thistle]  
**and silence moulds (7.2)**  
[well, who am i  
supposed to talk to about this  
except for in a poem commentary  
no one will read?  
they’d call me crazy and rightly so]

 **such strangeness as was mine a little while; (8)**  
[i’ve never spoken of this before;it  
took about two minutes in real life,  
but lasted two years in my daymare]

 **moments when my once more illustrious arms (9)**  
[yeah.you're the only one  
who could ever make me  
seem illustrious;  
you’re just…way too sinful  
for scientific measurement—i suppose  
that’s why they can’t measure smexy;  
the moments  
bit makes me furious because  
you held me  
only a moment but also long  
enough to turn us into third years,  
yesthankyousirandma’am  
i’m a third year so why do you get surprised  
when my pitches are better  
than they were just a little  
while ago?and why am i obviously  
not as stupid as before?bakas  
you’re all bakas  
everyone single one of you(except Okumura)]

 **are filled with fascination,when my breast (10)**  
[if breast means heart,  
then that's a definite yes,  
i was fascinated and continue to be with  
how happy i was around you;  
also you’re fucking  
hot but i suppose i already  
said that in the illustrious arms bit]

 **wears the intolerant brightness of your charms: (11)**  
[of course it was intolerable;  
you were so bright that your heart  
nearly burned me alive  
enough that i know so very well  
that in this realdream you're  
more dull and cold than a pewter  
candle holder left out in the snow--  
so why would a pewter boy like you dream  
at all  
much less of loving a person with more than  
one candle to melt in your arms]

 **one pierced moment whiter than the rest (12)**  
[pierced.i suppose that means you pierced my heart—  
that goes without saying,but if it’s whiter than the rest  
—too bright like the sun shining  
in a cheesy romantic way;i  
suppose that’s when you gave me the ring  
and explained the shisaa thing?never thought it’d matter  
to me before,but after  
you had a sort of un/marriage  
ring made based on yang/yin,gave  
the yang to me saying it would keep me safe,kept  
the yin saying it would remind me of you—teme  
you must have your side of the ring  
so why  
the silence?  
how did i get one side of the ring  
if it’s(we're) obviously the half(ves) of a whole,  
you said i’d be in your atom  
but you lied,you’re a lier just as much as i--  
i suppose that means we belong  
together]

 **—turning from the tremendous lie of sleep (13)**  
[what is sleep in a daymare,if not a lie or sad  
joke?just a way to pretend  
that a dull person is more than a loud  
baseball idiot?a person that can’t bat  
better than a monkey with a banana fetish?  
and i’m not sorry i lied to you  
by saying i’d always love you,cause i betrayed  
you by waking up;  
besides those pathetic wannabes  
try to kiss me and they  
have absolutely no skill,like their lovegames  
suck gigantic tanu balls—still  
i got rid of your shitty ring,they gave  
me a nickname for wearing  
it,why’d you make me wear that crap if you  
weren’t going to wear the matching half?  
i hate you  
why can’t i forget you?stupid  
ring i threw it away but i can imagine  
it hanging under my jersey,wtf  
just leave me alone already;  
wait  
a minute please!forget everything  
in this shitty bracketnikki,  
and just give me a call,i’m available  
in either day or nightmares—  
if your ghost  
is the only thing I can get that’s okay  
by me;the absence of you feels  
worse than the queen of west tokyo  
and monkey-chan crushing me  
into a bloodypile of dirt,bats made of rusty nails]

Now please be nice to me, no one ever called me an ace of poetry, art or English grammar. Of course this poem choice has nothing to do with a person you know from earlier in this diary, but the commentary probably is. I purposely didn't use Pablo Naruda so there you have it, this is definitely positively anno Eijun. I'M NOT SORRY. Okay maybe a little sorry but not that much! Well, I am sorry I didn't comment on Allen Ginsberg's Master poem, but only because it would have mortified even me to talk about blow jobs and like some kind of almost bdsm stuff. Too scary by far! Can't believe you once (shit, this isn't directed at Kanemaru--I hate how he creeps up in my brain at the oddest moments) that is, Kanemaru once told me to use that poem to seduce our sensei. His mind was so dirty then...also a figment of my imagination.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 7 Glossary
> 
> baka (馬鹿, ばか, or バカ) the kana spelling is used for idiot, stupid, etc. but I bet you already knew that!!!
> 
> gaki (餓鬼) means brat, urchin, little annoying kid, troublemaker
> 
> white kick is a wasei way of saying _howaitokikku_ , meaning that flat dead silence when someone makes a stupid joke that no one in the room finds funny
> 
> I hope you know who Allen Ginsberg and Pablo Naruda are, but if you need help please ask Wikipedia-sensei!
> 
> So I enjoyed this chapter but am really itching for more action of the scary/thriller/super smexy variety. Well, the smexy is post-scary but I find it quite enjoyable regardless.


	8. a poor tool

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'The fact is,’ said the Voice, ‘I shall have to make use of you... You're a poor tool, but I must.’  
> ‘I’m a miserable tool,’ said Marvel.  
> ‘You are,’ said the Voice.  
> ‘I’m the worst possible tool you could have,’ said Marvel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes I edit this at like 4 in the morning and the stylus in my hand accidentally deletes words or changes whole paragraphs as I nod off. So keep that in mind LMAO.  
> A little bird told me that my Sandman link was dead so I just stuck the whole slightly disturbing excerpt at the end of [chapter 5](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5785432/chapters/13835236).  
> It's usefull for understanding ch 8 and the rest of this fic if you forgot about the Freudian eyeballs quote and weird nekomata (a nekomata is like that one in Ao no Futsumashi/ Exorcist).  
> Songs:  
>  **Monster Lead Me Home**  
> [YouTube](https://youtu.be/WP5g2jUbSgA)  
> [Spotify](http://spoti.fi/20iBg46)
> 
>  **The Handler ******  
> [YouTube](https://youtu.be/BF1DQr5dKW8)  
> [Spotify](https://play.spotify.com/album/2wart5Qjnvx1fd7LPdQxgJ)  
>  This gets pretty cracklin' cracktastic. Your favorite kurobas bad boy makes his first appearance as typical fashionably late joykill.  
> I never claimed to be an expert in any of this so blame Sawamura and the rain, which is actually prolific the past few days. I didn't do a rain dance but I was pretty happy. Looks like there'll still be a drought though. Blame the bad boy who will soon become much badder.  
> The Miyucrab Anon meeting was restless today. Hence, MadLibs on crabby crack. I NEED MORE MIYUCRABS but crab installments will be limited to about 2 per chapter since I'm not _that_ creative.

 

* * *

**Minor Virgo Poem Classification.**

**Eightfold Inner Library Dimensions 3 to 11.**

**Local Consortium.** おとめ座銀河団 Virgo

 **Library.** 銀河系 Milky Way

 **Row.** 太陽系 Solar

 **Book.** 地球 Earth

 **Chapter.** 敷島 Shikishima (Japan)

 **Poem.** 関東， 東京 Kantō Region, Tōkyō

 **Stanza.** 青心高校 Seidō High School

* * *

**Lesser Fourth Dimension Interspecies Warden Classification.**

**Local Virgo Coordinator.** ふたご座神 今吉 翔一 Futagozakan Imayoshi Shōichi

 **Milky Way Sight Handler.** 山羊座神 花宮 真 Yagizakan Hanamiya Makoto

 **Earth Data** (Current as of 2.0.0000.739459 Virgo Rotations).

**Kantō, Japan.**

**Index ID.** 2プラン2宇宙7十年4412世紀739459回転数 (8陣内狛犬)

Plan 2-Universe 2-Decade 7-Century 4412-Revolution 739459 (8 pairs).

 **Sight Host No. 2.1-Primary**.  陣内狛犬 金丸 信二 jinnai komainu (om) Kanemaru Shinji

 **Sight Host No. 2.2-Primary.** 陣内狛犬 沢村 栄純 jinnai komainu (a) Sawamura Eijun

* * *

**Milky Way Interspecies Warden Training Records.**

**Sight Handler.** 山羊座神 花宮 真 Yagizakan Hanamiya Makoto

**Sight Handler Observations.**

**Seidō High School Log No. 907.1.1:** **Tōkyō Pair II.**

 **jinnai komainu (om) No**.  陣内狛犬 #2.2.1-7-4412-739459 (8)

 **jinnai komainu (a) No.** 陣内狛犬 #2.2.2-7-4412-739459 (8)

 **fourth dimension location.** 23時50分 11:50 pm on 2015年5月8日(金) 8 May 2015 (Friday)

 **third dimension location.** 青心高校寮/Seidō Dorm does it really matter that much

 **local weather.** I can’t believe you’re still asking this

**Observations.**

After threat to (imaginary) partner, first replacement sight host readily accepted invasive eye procedures. Someone my age should stop laughing at the irony of relinquishing the library of your body in order to possess the dream poems of another. I won't lie and say I didn't enjoy the screams just a tiny bit too much. Any sort of penetration can be oh so easy - or not. You'd think that after all these years I would lose pleasure in the sight of others' pain. Seems like it's an issue with the author of the Capricorn series. I swear it's not my fault, officer. 

Maybe I just need to get laid.

Too bad there's no one around for several million leaps. On my next vacation, I expect some sort of compensation for this ridiculous celibacy.

That's not a joke. And I'm sure that your time as "captain" will have taught you the meaning of both those words. [An aside - what are you actually up to there? Do you have some sort of basketball fetish? Is that even a thing? Because the zen of basketball is no more interesting than the zen of archery (or baseball, for that matter). Believe me, I know.]

Back to the subject at hand. I have to admit it's incredibly easy to manipulate these children. Would have expected more from supposed athletes. Yatagarasu in particular must be disappointed to see his son as such a childish, emotional neophyte.

However, his twin seems to have a better sense of how dangerous it is to go around showing off talents he learned in the dream dimension. He takes his job as sometime lover so seriously that he took pains to avoid detection while he fished that ridiculous ring out of a rubbish bin filled with vomit. It nearly makes me want to vomit myself from this unbelievable display of romantic cheese, since he was unaware of his motions, was essentially blind, soul located somewhere in a stinking locker room across the city, without any knowledge that Sawamura had thrown a tantrum. It was so...eerie to feel his body move but not at my behest. I suppose a gut reaction? How funny these humans can be!

The only logical explanation is that he knows on some basic level that the ring is a symbol of their unity, and without unity they'll basically die. I suppose drifting aimlessly about the dull grey "hell" library dimension is a form of living, but not quite as fun as seeing green plants, having sex (can you please???) and generally enjoying the pleasure of physical bodies.*

Maybe the problem we're having in this book is that the author has decided to spin all sorts of moral allegories in little coded lessons only you, I and a very limited few can hack. I suppose he was very bored this time around. I mean, seriously, baseball tournaments that reduce children to hiding injuries? Not that I don't enjoy watching them in pain but still, that's a bit harsh considering I already have to remove some of Tokyo's best eyeballs. They tend to have poor memories though (despite the fact that they have pathetic versions of paper tree bark "libraries" that mostly contain drivel) and forget hard earned lessons from their ancestors.

So the possibility can't be that foreign to them. They borrow their own shitty books! Moreover, sometimes they never return their books, throw them away, or simply lose them, never to be found again. Not that I'd be careless enough to lose these, they're attached to my own body, since his body is now mine --so the problem only arises during organ transfer. Okay, so there's that one time I  _unintentionally_  dropped the organs, then squashed them with a careless foot or two... I might have lost some souls in transition  _accidentally_  (give me a break here, they're so small) once or twice but I have tried harder of late, you know that. So maybe it's happened more often than that, but you get what I mean. I'm generally trustworthy as a sight handler. Nobody said I had to be nice about it, though.

I am curious to see (that's not a joke, but you can laugh in that horrific way if you'd like) if these two will decrypt some of the poem codes, given the fact that they enjoyed theirpoorly disguised foreplay/kōkan nikki.

The following is a copy of the log you requested. It's hardly a Bible or Koran, I have no idea why you'd want to read it before it's all done.

* * *

****Tōō Observation Log No. 1.1** **

**Sight Handler.** 山羊座神 花宮 真 Yagizakan Hanamiya

 **Sight Host ID.** 2.1.1-7-4412-739459.(8)

 **fourth dimension location.** 19 時30分 7:30 pm on 2015年5月8日(金) 8 May 2015 (Friday)

 **third dimension location.** 青心高校寮 Seidō High School Dorm

 **local weather.** why does this matter if I have no body

 **song(s).** _Monster Lead Me Home_  by Sara Hartman (haha, see, I’m the monster)

and _The Handler_  by Muse (because one can never have too much Muse).

**Journal.**

First things first: the soul recorder set out for me is worse than the first version of Siri.

Second: Hanamiya, I would thank you for the gift of recording actual feelings if your generosity weren't an obvious way of placating an unruly indentured servant. In honour of this Trojan horse, I will share with your own masters the idiotic cruelty you've been responsible for while you wore my eyes today.

I have no clue who’ll read this besides Handsy McHandler Hanamiya. If you happen to be human, or are able to take the appearance of one, I beg beg beg you not to give the information contained here to Sawamura Eijun. It would break his heart.

I know it’s not going to break my handler’s heart, since he literally never had one.

The truth is, this is something Eijun as he exists today could not fathom. Recently my eyeballs were attacked by an alien who calls himself Hanamiya Makoto (on Earth). Attacked is really not the right word to use, but I can't admit what the other word is without hurting myself any further. Besides, I'm certain there are no words in any human language to explain the way he stole my eyes. The pain was indescribable, not physically but emotionally, because one moment I was me, and the next I was not. It was a quick sort of scoop feeling that didn't change my physical body, but nevertheless removed everything that people (Eijun) know as  _Kanemaru Shinji_. I'll probably never understand the science of it, but he yanked my spirit forward through my eyes - and suddenly I was outside, looking at a body that now belonged to someone else. There's no anaesthetic for being possessed by an alien.

I don't see out of my body anymore. He does. 

Don’t feel sad for me, I agreed to the whole thing in the first place. I did it for Eijun. If I don’t let Hanamiya borrow my vision physically, I won’t be able to accomplish my job. I can’t be in two places as once. I secretly think he just wants to fuck with me and this whole thing is one very twisted joke, then one day he’ll shove me back into my body with that twisted “Baaaka” and stick his tongue out at me (what’s that all about, anyway? Oedipal complex?).

Regardless of whether or not he’s telling the truth, I’m pretty sure there’s something important about us as a pair, in love or otherwise. I mean, we both had the same dream, albeit at different times. Eijun doesn’t know, since I haven’t been able to tell him, but I slept months earlier than he did, before the summer tournaments; Eijun slept some time after we lost Chris-senpai and the other third years. We were kicked out of our dreams at separate times and places, but were doing the same things at the same “time” during our dream. So I woke up before Eijun did, and he was not the person I thought he was.

Hence this huge confusion that Hanamiya has probably orchestrated. I bet he's crouched like a spider in my brain right now, watching our sad soap opera unfold, imaginary popcorn and Pepsi at his side.

Apparently komainu/shisa/shishi etc are based on real lions, or rather, real people. It’s really confusing to me, but Hanamiya says that jinnai komainu like Eijun and myself protect life itself in the Kanto region. What I mean by that is that we help the flow of human time continue in a ceaseless loop in the eyes of the beholder. We’re actually walking around a sort of cosmic maze, but it’s a maze with no beginning or end. Like a book you can’t close or open. We’re actually inside of a book, that is, we’re like codes in a universal computer that moves us around like 1s and 0s. But if a virus messes with universal code, we get off on the wrong path, and time appears to move in the wrong way. Take, for instance, my dream. What happened was real. BUT I was in a different “dream” dimension where time does not exist, but place does. Can you imagine if everyone shifted back and forth off time-kilter? We live like a twisted bike wheel that squeaks “ee-er ee-er” and flops us around in confusion. One moment, we’d be in yesterday. The next moment, we’d be in a couple months from now. We go to sleep, it’s normal again, we wake up and it’s two years ago, we have the memories but now can’t figure out if we’re dreaming or awake.

So Eijun and I are crucial to keep time in alignment here, and our relationship is really important in order to guard time and thus, reality. It’s something like we guide or “guard” people as they walk through the cyclical labyrinthine walk of time around the universal book or computer (you get what I mean, we’re just bits of information in an algorithm but it’s easiest to think of us as living in a book with a table of contents and index).

That means we need backup in case something goes wrong. Hanamiya told me I need to get eight more pairs. Eijun will get another eight. I’ve volunteered to take his part of the job, but I’m not sure what the higher ups will say (assuming Hanamiya even tells someone). If Hanamiya gets his eyes, I will find a way to kill him. I’m not joking.

* * *

Late this evening I was observing (stalking) Eijun as he practiced the fine details of transitions between left and right windups, different windups for different situations, etc while pitching to Okumura. Obviously, if there's a significant difference in strength and flexibility in left versus right pitching positions, he'll have to either stick with what he has in this dimension, or work damn hard to even himself out. The whole point of these nightly practices is to help Eijun get revenge, but I can tell he's confused about everything and this is mostly a way to see if he's crazy or not. I personally just want him to be happy, and if this makes him happy I'll support it with all I have. The fact that I can't really pisses me off.

The occasional judgemental croak from Coach Frogface isn't helping me any with the support thing. I have no confidence in his ability to be a decent human being or make Eijun more self confident. His position as sole source of guidance in this is scary and irritating, since I have no idea if he's trying to help Eijun improve or ruin him before Furuya has a chance to surpass the speed and staminarol of everyone on the team. Never one to pass up an opportunity to subvert Kataoka-kantoku, the Frog has enjoyed teaching (manipulating) Eijun when they should all be in bed. Especially Eijun. What evil machinations the man has in store for my pitcher are probably more complex than I could guess. If I actually dreamed I’m sure they would be nightmares full of his cackles and visceral images of his goatee stroke that one can never unsee. Not that I’ve heard him cackle before, so he must save it for home when he tortures mice. I feel like Hanamiya has something to do with that amphibious asshole, IMHO.

It’s easy for the Eijun I know to see in splatter vision, but that’s only used for detecting small movements, and not for complete narrow focus. He used to be able to shift back and forth at will quickly, but he’s been really frustrated that his body takes so long to pick up where it left off in Dream-Seidō. I wish I could be there to comfort him or at least give him a manly pat on the back for trying so hard to live up to impossible expectations. He used to desire the ace number. Now he desires revenge, understanding his past, and the ace number all at once. It makes for one hot mess. A hot mess that’s been attracting everyone’s attention lately. I’ll leave that disturbing development for another time when I have time to make bloodthirsty screams.

To me it seems like my baby (shut up, Hanamiya, that's what I call him so get used to it) is extremely glad to freely use his whole body during these clandestine practices. Read: he yoshed so loud tonight when his fast balls got up around 135 (130-right, 135-left) twice in a row that Okumura had to tackle Eijun a la Kuramochi. Which sort of pissed me off, enough to plant a nightmare seed in his annoying empty brain as he drifted off to sleep. I suppose you're a good teacher.

Anyway Eijun's windup balance on his right leg is still out of whack, while the small muscles in his left ass cheek (I just wanted to say ass honestly), thighs etc developed in practice and games just aren't used to being directed the opposite way. His whole right side seems tight from the tension of reigning in the natural inclination to change positions. I mean, what if someone told you to only look out of one eye? It would be irritating and maybe painful, right? So it'll be a while before he can truly demonstrate the full repertoire of his talent (the baseball kind) effectively in a game (or anywhere, really).

The past few years in Dream-Seidō, everyone (except for me) objected to him learning windups and pitches of what are essentially mirror images of each other. Wouldn’t that just make all of them weak? But somehow, as he always does, he proved them wrong. How he does it, I'd say I'm the only one in this dimension that could guess.

He played catch with his brother throughout his childhood, and was always trying to be as good as Corey in everything but never quite caught up (the large age difference didn't seem to occur to Eijun, but no one ever said he was a genius). A natural competitive streak in both of them led to practice after school every day, even if the weather was bad or they had tests to study for (Eijun didn't study for them). Corey got into a state college on a baseball scholarship, was 2nd draft in the Red Sox and the hero of everyone on the reservation and basically the entire region. No one had ever done anything interesting there. Living in the shadow of that was a bit like constantly trying to get the ace number, but no one knew he was trying and that made him try even harder.

Also, his vision is better than the average tanuki. He once told me all you have to do is see it like a solar system, where he's the sun. From there he can just cut it down the middle, then lift the two sheets up as though making origami. Those arcs are how he imagines pitching to the Earth (Miyuki, damn that lucky yarō) either clockwise (his left) or counterclockwise (his right). It made sense to him but I was thinking, you don’t generally cut origami paper, what happens in a changeup, our orbit is elliptical and the sun is more like the yolk of an egg, but I kept my mouth shut. If it worked for the baka, it worked for me.

Later tonight I looked (snooped around) in Eijun's homework for his biology class (hey now, I’m his tutor!). They were assigned to edit a Wikipedia article for a plant or animal, first writing it in html in order for the students to see how Wikipedia entries differ in markup I suppose. This is the text of his proposed changes. I'm completely certain it's your doing. At first it seems normal enough, but then it veers into Hanamiya Prankland. 

 

 

 

> <b>Tanuki Definition</b><br />
> 
> Tanuki, or raccoon dog (狸 , 貍) is a small Japanese mammal […]

At the very end of the entry you can read the following:

 

 

 

> In it's human shape-shifted form, a tanuki is called 御幸 一也 (Miyuki Kazuya). When addressed by others, a pronominal suffix such as -senpai or -senshu is typically added to Tanuki in lieu of the more formal Tanuki Kazuya. The suffix depends on the social status, age, and cheekiness of his addressee. <br />He currently occupies a prominent leadership role in Seidō High School's famous baseball club (located in Tokyo, Japan). Wearing the number two jersey, his official trifold position includes team captain, first string catcher, and batting cleanup. Exceptional skills in batter manipulation, offensive team analysis, bold and sometimes reckless plays have earned him the nickname "genius catcher."<br /> He earned the moniker "Tanuki" with a ceaseless string of snide comments, sarcastic humor, cruel pranks, relentless teasing, inappropriate sexual advances, insufferably cocky attitude, and severe emotional constipation. His tanu talents are widely rumoured to exceed his technical baseball skills. In his second year at Seidō, Tanuki-kun was chosen to bear a fourth responsibility as Seidō's VMB (very manipulative bastard) in a nearly unanimous popular vote. He bested his opponent Kuramochi Yōichi in a landslide of 99% to 1. <br />Other nicknames for Tanuki-kun include but are not limited to: <br />
> 
> <ul><li>御幸狸 (Miyuki-tanuki)</li>
> 
> <li>御幸君 (Miyuki-kun)</li>
> 
> <li>御幸先輩 (Miyuki-senpai)</li>
> 
> <li>御ちゃん (Mi-chan)</li>
> 
> <li>狸君 (Tanu-kun)</li>
> 
> <li>狸べえ (Tanu-bee)</li>
> 
> <li>狸坊 (Tanu-bō)</li>
> 
> <li>狸様 (Tanu-chama)</li>
> 
> <li>狸ちゃん (Tanu-chan)</li>
> 
> <li>狸ちん (Tanu-chin)</li>
> 
> <li>狸ぴょん (Tanu-pyon)</li>
> 
> <li>狸ぼう (Tanu-rin)</li>
> 
> <li>狸たま (Tanu-tama)</li>
> 
> <li>狸たん (Tanu-tan)</li>
> 
> <li>狸爺 (Tanukijijii), and</li>
> 
> <li>狸親父 (Tanukioyaji).</ul><br />All the Tanu above may be shortened to Tan or lengthened to Tanuki. <br />An inexhaustive list of less polite (but more frequently used) nicknames are: <ul><li> 陛下 一也 (Heika Miyuki)</li>
> 
> <li>糞貍選手 (Kusotanu-senshu)</li>
> 
> <li>貍との (Tanu-tono)</li>
> 
> <li>キャップ貍 (Kyapuu Tanuki)</li>
> 
> <li>Captain McCrabbypants</li>
> 
> <li>Crabbon MacPubeth</li>
> 
> <li>Sir Itchi McScratchesson</li>
> 
> <li>Sir Smirksalot</li>
> 
> <li>ちんげとの (Chinge-tono or Pube-tono)</li>
> 
> <li>キャッチャー (Kyacchaーtono)</li>
> 
> <li>貍との (Tanu-tono)</li>
> 
> <li>糞先輩 (Kuso-senpai)</li>
> 
> <li>ド美少年 (Dobishōnen)</li>
> 
> <li>かず野郎 (Kazuyarō)</li>
> 
> <li>ばかずや (Bakazuya)</li>
> 
> <li>アイキャッチャー との (Aikyacchaーtono)</li>
> 
> <li>カズノバ先輩 (Kazunoba-senpai)</li>
> 
> <li>カズノバ一也先輩 (Kazunoba Kazuya-senpai)</li>
> 
> <li>かずくず屋君 (Kazukuzuya-kun)</li>
> 
> <li>貍野郎選手 (Tanuyarō-senshu)</li>
> 
> <li>貍がきっこ (Tanugakikko)</li>
> 
> <li>糞眼鏡 (Kusomegane)</li>
> 
> <li>眼鏡がき (Meganegaki)</li>
> 
> <li>軟派っこ (Nanpakko)</li>
> 
> <li>軟派との (Nanpa-tono), and</li>
> 
> <li>糞キャッチャー (Kusokyacchaー).</li></ul>

I didn’t edit that for him. That was probably the second gift you gave me today. I don’t think he'll get in trouble so much as his sensei will try to figure out who tricked the poor gullible kid into writing it. Also, Eijun sucks at any kind of html markup, and they were only given a day to make an outline.

I also found some rather offensive classwork that apparently was filled out via your eyes and Eijun.

Here’s an example of some English classroom discussion material designed for small children that was supposed to be fun but turned into a disaster area by **YOU** (me, what’s going to happen to me?!): 

On to the Aomine log:

* * *

 **陣内狛犬** **jinnai komainu (om) No.** #2.2.1-7-4412-739459 (8)

**Observation Log 1.1**

So I fixed some of the things you asked for. I hope there’s no v1.2.

 **location.** Tōō Academy

 **target profile.** 1-A

 **name**.  青峰 大輝 Aomine Daiki - meaning of name to be discussed in next log

 **gender**. male

 **age**. 16 yr

 **DOB**. 1998 年31月8日(月) 31 August 1998 (Monday) - why are there so many ways to write days in anyway?

 **height**. 192 cm

 **weight**. 85 kg

 **eye colour.** blue

 **hair colour.** blue (this is just ridiculous how someone can be so hot it’s unfair and I think you fault, somehow)

 **blood type**. B. meaning flirty, dirty, flexible, good at reading body language; compatible for AB, B.

 **astrological sign.** virgo - to be discussed next log because I’m lazy

 **occupation.** first year student, Tōō Academy

 **extracurricular activities.** basketball club

 **team.** Vorpal Swords - meaning of name to be discussed in next log

 **position.** power forward

 **jersey no.** 5\. I hope there’s no symbolism there because I’ve had enough for a lifetime

 **captain.** Imayoshi Shōichi (Futagozakan, Earth form, scary eyes, I can’t believe he’s your boss)

**personality characteristics.**

  * lazy when not challenged in areas he excels in (neutral)
  * poor academic performance, intentional (-)
  * believes in inherent talent versus hard work in order to achieve success (-)
  * strong fortitude (+)
  * perseverance in the face of constant change/challenge (+)
  * seeks personal victory in win versus lose mentality (-)
  * ostensibly heterosexual orientation (this dimension), presenting a hurdle for this komainu (-)
  * black and white thinking (-)
  * seeks to learn via personal confrontation, rather than through mistakes (-)
  * judemental (-)
  * egotistical (-)
  * practical (neutral)
  * sexual magnetism (+, damn him)
  * loyal (+)
  * protective (+)
  * stubborn (neutral)
  * prone to violence (-)
  * overly self-confident (-)
  * individualistic (neutral)
  * difficulty forming, maintaining close relationships, perhaps due to stress (-)
  * no evidence of an ability to comprehend the “supernatural” (-); however
  * has ability to attain a zen state of mind on the court, popularly known as “zone” (+)
  * knows nothing about metaphysics, physics or interest in studying either (-)



**other**.

  * primary relationships with Momoi Satsuki, Kuroko Tetsuya (one-sided), Kise Ryōta
  * member of so-called Kiseki no Sedai (Generation of Miracles)
  * familiar with Japanese street ball



**net personality score**. −7

 **goal**. neutralise score through relationship (romantic or otherwise), use pair as the first of eight Tokyo jinnai komainu backups if Sawamura and I fail or die somehow

**observation notes. - unedited. didn’t feel like it.**

Today I met Aomine Daiki and I wasn’t particularly excited to tell him about this shit (I'm not sorry Hanamiya, cursing you and our book is the least I can do to vent). It’s not every day that you meet someone that’s physically invisible, has a shadow, sometimes talks in your head, but is visible in a mirror (sans eyes). Also, his data says he’s an idiot in everything except basketball. I suppose I’ll be using a ton of balls metaphors that will make him laugh and provoke me to return the favour with nightmares.

So the name of his komainu twin is Midorima Shintarō. Looking at his sexual data, I was certain that it’d be nearly impossible to get these guys together. Turns out Aomine is a really dirty motherfucker. I say that in the nicest way possible. When Eijun said he was bi, I didn’t think that would necessarily be the truth. Well, it is. He’s a boobs man, sure. He’s also an ass man. And the ass he’s most concerned about lately belongs to….wait for it….wait for it…

Midorima Shintarō.

So the potential pairing isn’t that far fetched. But from my Midorima data, it appears like they have a better chance of winning the lottery than getting together on a bromance basis. That’s really all I need here, a close partnership. But these basketball idiots are so dense emotionally and competitive it would gives me a headache. If only I had a physical head at the moment.

Picture me, poor unsuspecting shade. I'm watching Aomine at practice, running around in circles, sweating like a very attractive horse. I've yet to introduce myself. I'm honestly a bit nervous. This guy's a basketball prodigy. He's hot enough that if I didn't have Eijun (and know exactly how flexible he can be), I'd almost consider chatting him up.

Then he gets closer. As a shade I can sort of smell someone's thoughts. He smells like a trash heap. All sorts of dirty images of het and gay BDSM are racing through his brain like they’re trying to win the MotoGP at Twin Ring. I almost laugh because the pictures I see are so amateur they scream innocent virgin. Nonetheless he seems interested in really kinky stuff.

And who is administering said whip? Who's the dom in this fantasy master/slave relationship? Guess. Ding ding ding, we have a winner! It's none other than...Midorima Shintarō! Lol

And this is what I have to work with?

I can't believe he can whiz around the court in his zone/zen type thing and not get a stiffy.

Then I realize he's working so hard in order NOT to get hard. It makes sense, to try and work out his frustration on the court. Only problem with that is, he's leaving his team members in the dust. That's one of the things I'm supposed to help him overcome on a permanent basis. Having good teamwork for one practice, one game, is not enough. In a job as jinnai komainu, he'll have to constantly consider the needs of others.

Hell, in his (increasingly improbable) role as boyfriend he'll have to think about Midorima's needs. Something tells me that it was either passionate love or indifference with this guy. He could never just be best mates with Midorima.

Meaning, I need to bust my nonexistent ass to get Midorima to fall madly in love with Aomine. Based on Midorima’s data, that seems completely impossible. Sure, they could be good in bed together. But get them out from under the sheets, there's no way I can....

Wait.

Wait.

What if all I need is to convince Midorima to be a dom? True BDSM could definitely involve falling in love (assuming the participants weren't already in love or a close relationship), especially considering it requires absolute trust. It's fairly obvious to me from the tmi images of Midorima pounding into Aomine’s unnaturally hot ass that he wanted to be on bottom. Hopefully, Midorima could handle being the top, or at least a switch. Getting such a prude to spank and use creative methods to induce rather intense elements of sexual sensation might be a challenge. But it seems like my best option at the moment. Also I bet Hanamiya was planning this the whole time.

**conclusion.**

Aomine is a horny bastard who will probably die before admitting he’s got a crush on a guy that he's played basketball with for years. Still need to meet in person; am currently wondering how to stifle his screams when he hears but doesn't see me. Hanamiya: the practice on prisoners was not enough to figure out how to meet someone a nice way. That is, a non-Hanamiya way. Currently, my plan is to have Midorima fall madly in love with Aomine via BDSM in best case scenario. Or, some kind of really creative vanilla sex that will require actual brain cells that neither Aomine of I have. Probably first need to figure out why a pretty Smurf is so excited about a giant carrot. Is there more to the carrot than meets the eye? Next time, on Let's Torture Kanemaru!! --actually talk with Aomine. Try not to hurl when I get permission to enter his brain.

 

* * *

Look, I’m not going to hand in my letter of resignation, but I do recall two guys from a book I had to read in class a few years ago. It’s called the Invisible Man**, which I’m sure you’ll laugh at, since humans of course are very stupid. I went searching in a real physical library with actual paper things like a horrible Harry Potter addict because I was so determined to find this passage: 

 “‘The fact is,’ said the Voice, ‘I shall have to make use of you... You're a poor tool, but I must.’  
‘I’m a miserable tool,’ said Marvel.  
‘You are,’ said the Voice.  
‘I’m the worst possible tool you could have,’ said Marvel.  
‘I’m not strong,’ he said after a discouraging silence.  
‘I’m not over strong," he repeated.  
‘No?’  
‘And my heart's weak. That little business—I pulled it through, of course—but bless you! I could have dropped.’  
‘Well?’  
‘I haven't the nerve and strength for the sort of thing you want.’  
‘I’ll stimulate you.’ [please don’t take that as a proposition, Hanamiya]  
‘I wish you wouldn't. I wouldn't like to mess up your plans, you know. But I might—out of sheer funk and misery.’  
‘You’d better not,’ said the Voice, with quiet emphasis.  
‘I wish I was dead,’ said Marvel.  
‘It ain't justice,’ he said; ‘you must admit... It seems to me I've a perfect right—’  
‘Get on!’ said the Voice.  
Mr. Marvel mended his pace, and for a time they went in silence again.  
‘It’s devilish hard,’ said Mr. Marvel.  
This was quite ineffectual. He tried another tack.  
‘What do I make by it?’ he began again in a tone of unendurable wrong.  
‘Oh! shut up!’ said the Voice, with sudden amazing vigour. […]”

So that sort of reminds me of my position — I’m sort of both invisible and Marvel, while you’re definitely not Marvel but sort of the evil stuff that led to the invisible man’s demise, don’t you think? I don’t suppose you think of yourself as evil, or if there is, in your library, anything that means evil. But I’d imagine that, if a person in your profession could be called evil, I’d put my money on you.

I bet this will get me in trouble. I don’t really care. I miss Eijun, I hate being a “miserable tool,” I hate myself and I hate Aomine Daiki. But what am I to do? I’m fucked either way, but I suppose that was your intent all along?

That’s a rhetorical question.

Also, if you do get angry, take it out on me instead of Eijun. And for fuckssake, quit with the Tanuki Wikipedia and MadLibs antics.

* * *

**Chapter 8 General Notes**

***** Dante's Inferno includes a second circle where sinners of a sexual nature (me) go. It's sort of grey and windy but you get to hang out with Cleopatra so that might be cool.

 ****** The excerpt is taken from [Chapter XIII. — MR. MARVEL DISCUSSES HIS RESIGNATION](http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks/fr100061.html) in The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells. I think War of the Worlds is a better work by Wells IMHO. Anyway for some reason I was leafing through the Invisible Man one day and I was like, hey that sounds like this fanfic.

There is a whole field of computational science called machine learning. It’s how Google works so well and how cars will be our personal servants in the future. Unsupervised learning is really cool because you give an equation information, but don’t give it rigid guidelines. Basically, a poem that writes itself. Talk to Wikipedia-sensei: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsupervised_learning>

I calculated Aomine's entire life story here http://timeanddate.com/s/2yw2

The MotoGP is a famous motorcycle race held at [Twin Ring Motegi](http://www.twinring.jp/english/motogp/).

**Weird Philosophy and Possible Social Commentary.**

Yes, I did a shipload of research for this; I’m such a perfectionist. But actually it’s pretty interesting since I didn’t know the little details of this stuff before and I never pass up an opportunity to stuff random crap in my head for those times when ppl need a walking encyclopaedia to annoy them. I also really love looking at the back story of individual kanji (not furigana etc). This time I was glad to learn that I got the whole shisa/shishi/komainu/lion dog thing completely wrong (if I want to make it about shrine protection specifically). Japanese culture is really really long and has all sorts of Chinese influences so I'lI probably get basically everything wrong here. I took 3 terms of this stuff but only remember I thought Confucius was kind of cool most of the time, wondered why it’s spelled tao but pronounced dao so could they just spell it dao, and that pickled plums are really gross to a person who needs her Wheaties.

Plus, I never considered the zone to just be zen until I

a) randomly read some of Dōgen’s circular Buddhist walk stuff via a crap Sribd app that keeps crashing (see: Zen in Japan <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen#Zen_in_Japan>);

b) realized Daiya no A had taught me not just particle physics but ALSO how to visualise the 11th dimension;

c) had a chat with Forestfish where we figured out that the whole kurobas series is about Dōgen Buddhism done the basketball way; leading me to

d) belatedly read the following (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Mountain_System>):

  **The Five Mountains and Ten Monasteries System** ( 五山十刹制度 Chinese: Wushan Shicha, Japanese: Gozan Jissetsu Seido) system, **more commonly called simply Five Mountain System, was a network of state-sponsored Chan (Zen) Buddhist temples** created in China during the Southern Song (1127–1279). **The term "mountain" in this context means "temple" or "monastery", and was adopted because many monasteries were built on isolated mountains.** The system originated in India and was later adopted also in Japan during the late Kamakura period (1185–1333).

> In Japan, the ten existing "Five Mountain" temples (five in Kyoto and five in Kamakura, Kanagawa) were both protected and controlled by the shogunate. In time, they became a sort of governmental bureaucracy that helped the Ashikaga shogunate stabilize the country during the turbulent Nanboku-chō period. Below the ten Gozan temples there were ten so-called Jissetsu (十刹) temples, followed by another network called Shozan (諸山 literally many temples). The terms Gozan and Five Mountain System are used both for the ten temples at the top and for the Five Mountain System network in general, including the Jissetsu and the Shozan.
> 
> There used to be in Kamakura a parallel "Five Mountain System" of nunneries called Amagozan (尼五山), of which **the famous Tōkei-ji is the only survivor.**

So, I have more evidence to support my twisted theory. I mean, rabid NBA fans, former cheerleaders and probably any American walking down the street (literally every public school has mandatory basketball training from the beginning until the second year of high school) knows that the whole series breaks about 10k basketball rules including holding the ball for like a million years, refs that can’t figure out something’s wrong when everyone on the other team has bruises and/or broken bones (with an obvi evil captain), and shooting behind the backboard but STILL SCORING. So what is it actually about then, aside from a way to fuel the Japanese economy via shōnen fangirl/boy merchandise furnaces? And wtf about the zone?

Okay take the “o” out and it’s a zen anagram. I suppose o could be male, since that’s a romaji for male. Anyway I believe that Kuroko’s Basketball is just Kuroko’s Group Zen-type-thingy. It’s about the circular walk/jog/run of an individual versus that of a group, which necessitates a sense of selflessness that is pretty darn Buddhist in nature. There are many types of Buddhist sects under the sun, but Dōgen’s talked about circular motion of being—we should practice ceaselessly, there is no beginning or end of the walk, etc. Let’s also recall that some monks can perform amazing physical feats that Westerners will probably never be able to comprehend.

Basketballs themselves are basically lots of circles like latitude vs longitude. The practice of basketball in a competitive arena is basically ceaseless in nature. That’s why their shoes get worn down, knees start to hurt, and locker rooms stink (antiperspirant may also be a factor in the latter).

**My twisted headcanon:**

The Five Mountains are either (the 2 may not be mutually exclusive): the 5 players necessary for a basketball team, and Ten Monasteries the total of 10 players when they play a game OR the Kiseki no Sedai broken apart into 5 teams. If that is true, a team represents a temple and a each member is a temple (a temple exists in each one of us that does the walk/jog/run of Buddhism). Then, each Kiseki no Sedai member is the head of that temple. That leads me to believe that this manga is about the zen of basketball. And the head of the temple (Kiseki no Sedai badass player that’s full of himself) is not the most important monk/player. You actually achieve a more fulfilling Buddhist basketball walk/jog/run by actively walk/jog/running in sync.

Maybe the mangaka was saying, dude the Five Monasteries/Basketball Players don’t have to be located on separate mountains. Maybe the Five Monasteries (as 5 members of a team that genuinely play as a team) are stronger united into one. Maybe it’s better to be together than isolated, because you can learn from each other and play really awesome basketball.

Anyway, can you see how I believe the mangaka was trying to say that basketballs are a bunch of Dōgen walks all joined together? And Kuroko could have had that intent all along (I mean he took time away from the game in Teikō to think about stuff), but didn’t feel like telling Kagami because there’s a reason why ppl call him Bakagami.

Any thoughts? And DOESN’T **TŌKEI-JI REMIND YOU OF TEIKŌ**??? ANYONE? BUELLER? BUELLER?

Social commentary on Western influence much? Needless to say I’m a big Dōgen fangirl now. But not of Scribd. Or my shitty tablet.

\---

 **American baseball pitching speed data.** The following is from [baseball player John Madden](http://www.yougoprobaseball.com/2/about/), who spent 6 years pro, 5th draft in 2008 by the NY Mets.

 **15 yo**  
average = 70 mph. (113 kph)  
median = 68 mph. (109 kph)  
mode = 69 mph. (111 kph)  
range = 65 - 74 mph. (105 − 119 kph)  
goal should be 80+ mph (129 kph)  
**16 yo**  
average = 76 mph. (122 kph)  
median = 74 mph. (119 kph)  
mode = 75 mph. (121 kph)  
range = 69 - 80 mph. (111 − 129 kph)  
goal should be 85+ mph (137 kph)  
**17 yo**  
average = 80 mph. (129 kph)  
median = 81 mph. (130 kph)  
mode = **81 mph** . ( **130 kph** )  
range = 71 - **85 mph** . (114 kph - **137 kph** )  
goal should be 90+ mph (145 kph)

I put Ei-chan in the top 17 yo speeds cuz I’m obsessed with him being successful. Also have I mentioned I don’t like canon Furuya? FuruSawa is pretty damn cute, though.

Furuya is said in the part II to pitch around 140 kmh (an 18 yo pitch speed). I find that a tad on the fantasy side given a pro’s data. However, anything is possible in manga!!! Can you imagine a Furuya zone? SCARY!!!!!

Here’s [Madden’s pitching history](http://www.yougoprobaseball.com/average-pitching-speed-for-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15-16-17-18-year-old-how-fast-should-i-be-pitching):

“At 12 I threw 62 mph  
As a freshman in HS I threw 81 mph  
As a sophmore in HS I threw 85 mph  
As a junior in HS I threw 87 mph  
As a senior in HS I threw 90 mph  
As a freshman in College I threw 91 mph  
As a sophmore in College I threw 92 mph  
As a junior in college I threw 93 mph  
As a senior in college I threw 94 mph  
As a first year Professional player I threw 95 mph  
And in my second year of Professional Baseball I threw 96 mph  
My 3rd - 6th season of pro baseball I did not get over 96 mph [sic]”

I love this pitching mechanics website if there are huge Daiya geeks out there <http://www.thecompletepitcher.com/pitching_mechanics.htm> 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 8 Glossary
> 
> The nicknames I made up for pobrecito Miyuki are not real and are never used anywhere except for my twisted imagination.
> 
> aikyacchaー (アイキャッチャー) means eye-catcher
> 
> bishōnen (美少年) means handsome youth (male); pretty boy
> 
> chinge (ちんげ) means penis or pubic hair; here I'm using it to mean pubic hair
> 
> do (ド) used here means damn
> 
> Futagoza (ふたご座) is the Gemini constellation, which is Imayoshi's sign (but the astrological sign has a separate name in Japanese, 双児宮/soujikyuu). Who is his twin? I don't know if that's something that will come up in the plot, but I won't promise anything.
> 
> heika (陛下) is used for sovereign royalty, male or female, like "Majesty."
> 
> kan (神), the way I used as a suffix, has several interpretations, one of which is related to the supernatural, meaning: god, deity; divinity; spirit; another word for kami. It's shorter so I used it instead of kami LMFAO.
> 
> -kantoku (監督) refers to the head coach. Frogface is just coach (コーチ).
> 
> kazunoba (カズノバ) means Casanova
> 
> kuso (糞) means actual feces/poo but also the interjection "shit!"
> 
> kuzuya (くず屋), not to be confused with kazuya, is a guy that goes through garbage, a trash man. I happen to love this one.
> 
> kyacchaー (キャッチャー) means catcher
> 
> kyappu (キャップ) is an abbreviation for captain
> 
> megane (眼鏡) means glasses. bet you already knew that.
> 
> nanpa (軟派) has several meanings but here I use it as seducer; smooth talker; ladies' man; playboy
> 
> -senshu (選手) is an honorific suffix used for an athlete instead of -san
> 
> tanukijijii (狸爺) means cunning, sly old man
> 
> tanukioyaji (狸親父) means cunning, sly old man
> 
> -tono (殿, との), is pronounced dono どの, and used here as an old form of addressing a lord, meaning something like "milord," maybe how servants would use in a Japanese Downton Abbey (scary thought)
> 
> Yagiza (山羊座) is Capricornus (constellation); Capricorn or the Goat. The astrological sign for Capricorn is 磨羯宮/makatsukyuu, and Hanamiya's sign. I personaly think he's less goat and more serpent.
> 
> yarō (野郎) means bastard
> 
> Yatagarasu (八咫烏) is a mythical creature known in Japan as the raven who aided Emperor Jimmu on his eastern expedition; and in China as a three-legged crow inhabiting/ruling the sun
> 
> I probably spelled the dorm name wrong. meh.


	9. too many feels

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A few months after I realized the person I loved was not a woman, and the inevitable implications of that, I had a nightmare of a hospital neonatal waiting room where I paced back and forth anxiously like any other expectant father. In my dream I was scared but incredibly happy—the kind of happy you only get to experience a few times in your life. It was a hundred times better than winning any baseball tournament. I felt that briefly until a doctor came out of the surgery, approached me with a frown and said _Sir, the woman you speak of does not exist, would you please leave the premises._ Truth be told, that nightmare still visits me from time to time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Kanemaru’s Songs**
> 
> Fuck Feelings by Born Ruffians  
>  [YouTube](http://bit.ly/1TzVi9k)   
>  [Spotify](http://bit.ly/1TzVqpl) 
> 
> Waiting for the Guns by Maigret Jnr  
>  [YouTube](http://bit.ly/25JidDK)  
>  [Spotify](http://bit.ly/1ozkW0W)
> 
> Separate Spotify playlists for each character:  
>  [Aomine](http://bit.ly/1Waafj5)  
>  [Kanemaru](http://bit.ly/1MQzyEv)  
>  [Miyuki](http://bit.ly/1ozltQp)  
>  [Sawamura](http://bit.ly/1ozlAeB)
> 
> I think my favorite playlist is Aomine’s. The playlist names are really stupid and I LOVE THEM (*≧▽≦)ﾉｼ)).  
>    
>  **Surprise, surprise?**
> 
> This is a chapter with multiple crossover POVs. I might…just might…parody Misawa but only a _teensy weensy_ bit. It’s actually half of what I wrote so I probably will take a week to polish up the rest. I need to catch up on a backlog of anime that is calling my name. Oh and then dig into my Colossal Titan Edition 2--FEMALE TITAN OSHI OSHI OSHI
> 
> It took me a while to figure this out. I shuffled dates around, played with the ideas of pranks, wrote most of Chapter 10 before I realized there was some emotional stuff I need to fill in before the Misawa and Kanesawa fans can receive all that shit thrown their way. I filled dreams out because my fingers wouldn't stop typing. What was once a bare bones nightmare paragraph turned into an absurd homage to Spiderman. The text format is how I imagine Aomine simplifies everything as much as possible. If you've ever seen me on Pinterest, you'll see I refer to Midorima as a carrot in everything. Probably Aomine OOC there. In previous fics, I made texts and tweets really convoluted. Don’t know if this format is ideal.
> 
> If any writers out there have an opinion on text formatting, let me know.
> 
> As a perfectionist, sometimes I just have to say to myself, “This is as good as it’s going to get right now. I need to watch some anime, so I’m posting this no matter what errors it contains.” Have fun with this, because I did, and I love to share my twisted sense of humor with anyone who’ll snigger with me.

* * *

**Milky Way Interspecies Warden Training Records.**

**Sight Handler.** 山羊座神 花宮 真 Yagizakan Hanamiya Makoto

**Sight Handler Observations.**

**Seidō High School.** Log No. 908.0

**Tōkyō Pair II.**

**jinnai komainu (om) No.** 陣内狛犬 #2.2.1-7-4412-739459 (8)

 **jinnai komainu (a) No.** 陣内狛犬 #2.2.2-7-4412-739459 (8)

 **fourth dimension location.** 23 時50分 11:50 pm on 2015年5月9日(土) 9 May 2015 (Saturday)

 **third dimension location.** Seidō High School Dorm, rolling on the floor laughing my fucking ass off

 **local weather.** I bet it’s a full moon because my inner nekomata wants to come out and play (e.g., rip some clothes off an unsuspecting female of basically any species)

**Observations.**

Father Imayoshi, please pray for me, since I have sinned against humanity yet again by directly interfering with the tragic love triangles of high school baseball idiots. It’s simply too much fun to resist. Oh Lord of Library Hosts, forgive me, for I have just finished yet another prank suggesting that Miyuki Kazuya has pubic lice. It is, of course, completely harmless. I have further plans that walk along the border of evil. I assure you the pranks never cross into a full fledged evil master plan. They skirt around it, just enough to satisfy my hunger to eat something, anything with raw emotions I can syphon.

I'm so excited I want to show these children what a real fast ball looks like, flying towards them at 150 kph developed from over a century of practice in two countries. Even better, the ball's final resting place would be within a lovely cavity in someone's skull. Oh, the agony and the ecstasy of the sacrificial pitcher lamb…No, heads will not break at this school, more's the pity. Hearts will though! Shall I supply a diabolical cackle? I've got plenty to spare.

I know, the last time they didn’t commit suicide but it was rather cruel of me to break them apart and save the third wheel for my own delectation. Haven’t feasted on that one yet, looking forward to the harvest sometime soon. I rather enjoy the prospect of making him burn a little, the white hot heat I can light in anyone with the hormones to respond. Yes, breaking hearts is a thousand times a thousand more delicious than destroying a simple knee. Knees can heal; hearts will remain broken forever, far into the lands of deathtime itself.

The fact that my pranks make my stay in hell that much longer is something I’m aware of. Indeed, while I deliberately torture someone, in the back of my mind I think, _this is a bad idea._  But 98% of my brain says, _shut the fuck up, if I’m in hell I might as well have some fun_.

So what if this latest scheme has to do with my own personal issues of **NEEDING TO GET LAID**. Apparently you won’t let me get laid so I have to resort to these (extremely hilarious) tactics to convince you to allow me to **GET LAID**. Did I mention I need to have sex, like, last century? Seriously, you know that a bakeneko like you and a nekomata such as myself have heat cycles just like any other neko on this planet. If I weren’t so fond of torture myself, I’d say you might actually be torturing me with celibacy. It feels like the last time I had a vacation was around the time the Mexíca were playing ullamaliztli* instead of basketball. Those were the days I could really destroy everyone and the ladies loved me for it. Look at me, Imayoshi, wallowing in such disgusting nostalgia. I’m so pathetic, you should visit both Kirisaki and Seidō to smack me in both faces.

Obviously fond memories of humans and their idiotic pastimes means sex deprivation is interfering with my ability to perform my job. Have you ever known me to love anyone, or anything, other than myself? No. Then aren’t you concerned that I wish I could just have sex with a human and get it over with? The thought is revolting, but I’m about a centimetre away from molesting Takashima Rei no matter how much I try to tell myself otherwise. The rack on that woman…I’d really rather Kanemaru not get expelled from this school, though. I want to at least make the attempt to finish the job here. I’m not that much of an asshole (although I could be, if I don’t get a vacation after the Tōkyō twins job is done).

Well, even if you don’t care about me, I think you’ll enjoy reading how this host and one of his rivals perform their “Dear lord, why, oh why won’t Sawamura kiss me?” song and dance. Don’t worry, I’ll kick some sense into him but reading all this is so much fun. I can’t think of anything he could do to actually regain access to his body or destroy his own soul without assistance. It must be impossible; I’ve never seen it done before.

Since I don’t get any fun in the bedroom I obviously have to find it elsewhere. In the end, it’s really all your fault.

I love this amusing collection of unrequited puppy love (un)literature…provided for you in chronological order, of course. It’s making me laugh so hard it’s nearly impossible for me to record this. Let the games begin! 

* * *

 **Tōō Observation Log No. 2.0**  
****

**Handler.** 山羊座神 花宮 真 Yagizakan Hanamiya Makoto

 **Host ID.** 2.2.1-7-4412-739459 (8)

 **4th dimension location.** 02 時00分 2:00 am on 2015年5月9日(土) 9 May 2015 (Saturday)

 **3rd dimension location.** Somewhere wandering around Kokubunji; probably close-ish to Seidō since I’m driven there like a filthy horse led to a water trough

 **local weather.** Can I punch the person who put this part in the log form please

 **song(s).** Fuck Feelings by Born Ruffians and Waiting for the Guns by Maigret Jnr

**Journal/almost log.**

Melodrama alert: I’m dead inside.

Prior to my recent heartbreak, I’d been wasting time between spy sessions on Seidō and Tōō by thinking about how to hack back into my own body. It’s harder than it sounds. I haven't got the ability or materials to write or draw; I’ve heard that smartphones reduce our short term memory capacity and I think it’s true.

The long and short of it is that I actually feel gross trying to force myself in. I’m sure that security against hacking. My body’s not a bathroom, but I have that feeling of being uncomfortable, like it’s impolite to try and get inside because well, someone else is inside (the life-thief, Hanamiya). However, I think it’s well within my rights to bang against the doors and windows of my brain in the vain effort of getting Hanamiya to say something to me without a) sticking his tongue out and b) smirking well enough to pown Miyuki any day of the week. I’m looking forward to seeing _that_ meeting. But the act of resistance gives me energy and actually seems to wake my soul up a bit, if that’s possible. Soul coffee. I need plenty of it in order to hack brains that are locked well beyond my reach. Read into that what you will.

I’ve been told that human bodies can be compared to miniature libraries within a massive universe made up of countless books and libraries full of poems. Sometimes, for specific purposes, a human body can be borrowed for use by a different person, be it an alien or another human. This happened through the soft tissue of my eyes, which I think of as the doors to my brain library, but I’ve sensed weak openings through my ears, nose and mouth (something like windows). Occasionally I yell at my handler through my ears while he’s asleep (the other two being gross). I know he can hear me, since he twitches a little. It would be funny if he weren’t wearing my face like a demonic kabuki mask.

From the little information I've been given, logic tells me that if a human library, such as mine, can be opened and closed, that means

  * these “books” made of my genetic blueprints, memories, thoughts, plans, and intentions **_can travel_ ** the way my soul traveled;
  * _**all the information and energy stored in my body**_ can be transferred, borrowed, recycled, destroyed;
  * the _**control**_ of my body’s DNA, brain, thoughts, soul can be transferred to and _**manipulated** _ by different people of different species;
  * _**they can do an unlimited amount of things to me**_ such as
    * make my body kiss someone gross,
    * pull some kind of prank that can expel me from school,
    * deliberately injure me on the field,
    * deliberately sabotage plays so that I fall off the first string,
    * hurt someone that I love, emotionally or otherwise,
    * mutate my DNA and/or give me hereditary diseases,
    * make me sick and/or kill me,
    * spray some kind of thought-graffiti on the inside of me—like lowering my self esteem,
    * cut out pieces of my memories,
    * paste fake ones in the empty spaces,
    * put the memories back in the same or even different locations,
    * read my memories
    * remove and keep part of my memories forever,
    * make me forget anything, no matter how important, and
    * even _**make me fall in or out of love with someone**._



I discovered the last one accidentally; I bet I was never supposed to find out. I think all the above are true as well. I’m not an idiot, Hanamiya, no matter how much you like to think I am. Why would you pick an idiot to be a jinnai komainu in the first place? I imagine at least one person has to be the brains in a pair, and bless the poor child but Eijun will never be in a talented and gifted program at school.

After the MadLibs stunt, I’m freaked out over what Hanamiya could do in the absence of my soul from my body. Will he try to shack up with someone else? Will he be mean to Eijun? All I’ve seen so far is my body asleep. Any other time I try to approach Seidō, his force of will pushes me away.

But it’s damn hard to open up this kind of brain library when it’s locked. Or rather, fully occupied. Right now only Hanamiya has the key to my body and physical brain.

[An aside: I’m a bit unclear on the distinction between soul and brain, but I do know that a soul can leave, while the brain must remain. Thoughts are formed by both the brain and what I think of as my soul, so there’s obviously a link there. I don’t know what Hanamiya is doing in my brain right now, and I imagine my brain isn’t aware of what my soul is doing over here. When or if I will be able to bring those thoughts together into my own composite memories? It must happen at some point, otherwise I’d go crazy…Hanamiya, you need to tell me about this asap.]

…Anyway. Hanamiyacan let Imayoshi borrow me on request. Anyone else can potentially inhabit my body, so Imayoshi says. Probably nobody but those two freaks would want to read me. I bet I’d get dusty on a life shelf somewhere if I had to be controlled like this forever. Good thing I can be taken out of the lending library database after these 8 pairs are set up. I really REALLY  **REALLY**  want to hack my body to get like a little vacation from prison. Aren’t there a couple minutes during the day or morning in which I could be with Eijun, tell him the reality of our situation? At least, that’s what I used to think. Not sure I really care too much now.

I can almost sense my library around this time in the morning, when I have some free reign to weave in and out of any person’s dream. If I were another person (Eijun, Hanamiya, Imayoshi) visiting the inside of a Kanemaru dream, then I could command myself to wake up. But my body is dreaming without the presence of my soul. I have no idea what’s going on in there at all, I can’t find my dreams and even if I could I’ve been assured that I’m locked out of those as well. (I suppose that could be where the memory/soul split is mended. Is it a way to get inside my brain? If I could only command my body to do anything…). So far, hacking my sleeping body is the only conceivable way I could think of reentering myself. That’s one way to hack a body; I haven’t the courage or knowledge to go through my own eyes.

It’s surprisingly easy to enter others’ dreams once you’re not limited to a body. All you have to do is wait until someone is asleep, then sort of make your soul sing to them (it sounds strange but works) in a vibration that locks into their brain waves at just the right moment. Kind of like surfing, or joining a group that’s jumping rope. It’s not bad if you miss the right moment, you just try another time until you fit into the wave and ride it inside the person’s brain. It’d be kind of cool if I didn’t have to give up my freedom, living in a nobody/nolove jail for the very confused and disillusioned.

Okay here’s a little bit of log, with a little bit of journal mixed in:

Today I gathered some data on other targets, then bugged Aomine, entering his dream as an introduction that wouldn’t make him scream like a little girl. I’m working on Midorima as well, but I just separated it here to avoid confusion. Anyway the tall blue Smurf goes to bed around 2300, so I had the opportunity to visit his dream around 0030, after which he got up to go pee and scratch his empty head about the dream he just had. Based on past observation, his REM cycle will let me visit him again around 0150, 0345, 0450, and 0555.

Being inside another person’s dream is kind of freaky sometimes, whether they’re friends or perfect strangers. Up until tonight I’d never encountered anything strange in Aomine’s dreams. Mostly I just watched him play fantasy basketball, the kind where he’s actually flying while making a slam dunk. Sometimes the dreams betray how much he misses playing in Teikō, especially with his friend Kuroko. Other times he practices unsafe sex that breaks all the laws of chemistry and physics I’ve ever heard about. I haven’t watched anyone else have sex though, it’s kind of gross, like watching couples kiss in movies. I always duck out of others’ dreams when they turn in the ecchi direction.

Aomine’s latest dream was a combination of fantasy basketball, Kiseki no Sedai, and sex. In the first dream I’ve ever interfered with, Aomine lost spectacularly to a nameless team with monstrous players. They lacked hair, eyes and ears but had slits for mouths that opened up wide enough to cut their face in half, unveiling long needle-like teeth that made me shudder. Their only facial expression was an insidious grin given only to Aomine when they fouled him, which happened constantly. Their uniforms had no numbers, and no team to identify them, but the color was blue and white, so I think that’s an obvious reference to his former Teikō middle school jersey. They made no sound except for high shrieks, like birds of prey, which maybe was supposed to be laughter.

I’d never felt so much secondhand embarrassment and dread in my life, so when I spotted Aomine’s captain I tried to make Imayoshi call a time out. This Imayoshi was taller than in real life, and when I tried to talk to him, he wouldn’t or couldn’t listen to me. He seemed much older, with a stern red face that was yelling at Aomine to get his head out of his ass and back in the game. I decided there was no use in bothering a mindless dream character, and went back to watching Aomine’s ego being torn apart. It was anything but pretty, and I really just wanted to close my eyes, but I needed to watch in order to figure out how to help him and Midorima.

I’ll start with the usual insecurity metaphors: he was the only person on the court wearing nothing but socks, shoes, and a bucket of sweat. Next, he failed in all areas of basketball fundamentals. He fumbled the ball when he dribbled, and it rolled out of his reach several times. The fingers themselves seemed shorter, thicker, and lacked the dexterity of Aomine’s real ones. He was slow, couldn’t even run across the court without having to stop and take a breather. His balance seemed off, and he stumbled instead of shifted quickly when he wasn’t being pushed around by the offense. What’s worse is that he couldn’t make a single clean shot on the inside or outside. It was as if any skill he’d ever learned had vanished from his body and mind.

The refs seemed to favor the opposing team, and only called Aomine’s fouls, none of which made any sense. He’d barely graze another player’s skin and he got a foul. If that weren’t already bad enough, no matter what he did, he eventually got fouled by the other team. For instance, in the fourth quarter he tried to get a rebound and was rewarded with a sharp elbow in the side and knees kicked out from behind. Except _Aomine_ was given the foul, not the other players. Every time he tried to block the offense he got a foul for absolutely no reason; the same went for the handful of successful rebounds he made. The Vorpal Swords lost 137 to 10 that day, and none of the 10 belonged to Aomine.

Probably the worst part was that Midorima and every other Kiseki no Sedai member was there watching  his humiliation, and their laughter was louder than anything else in the arena.

Then the dream abruptly cut to just Midorima and Aomine in the depths of a fantasy tropical ocean somewhere along a coral reef. The coral itself was vibrant orange with occasional streaks of black, an absurd but beautiful backdrop for swirling schools of tiny iridescent blue-green fish. The environment made me laugh a little because it called to mind that Nemo movie and the Disney ripoff of Grimm's Fairy Tales, the one with the mermaid and fork.

The two boys swam effortlessly among billowing clouds of fish without coming up for air, and any defect in Aomine’s previous appearance was gone. Some areas might have improved, but I can’t really say for sure because that area was, you know, already improved a lot and probably couldn’t have gotten any better. I won’t tell you exactly what happened, but I will admit it was a pornographic syrup-dripping, cream-filled confection that was hotter than any of my own personal wet dreams, which is saying something. As in, sexy enough to make me hide but peek through my fingers and sweet enough to give me cavities. Aside from the beauty and smut of it all, there was a peaceful ambient blue-green light surrounding us that turned the whole thing from a somewhat comedic porn flick into a candy cane (fingerlickin' good) yaoi manga. I’ve never read yaoi, but I assume it must have men and sex and romance with the occasional merman. 

I was, in fact, very jealous and wanted to spear a few fish or two. Being a voyeur isn’t the best job in the world—I felt like I was intruding in something special that was only meant for Aomine and Midorima to think about. I mean, it was sweet, they were like bony dolphins without the squeaks. But there’s only so much a lonely and bitter shade can take before wanting to change the dream channel to something more exciting.

Turns out I didn’t need to change the channel.

The boys were just at that, you know, finishing point of their dolphin dance when I saw the shadow of what appeared to be a large shark making slow circles above us. I felt an odd shiver run up my spine and tried to warn them, even though it was a fairly awkward moment. They looked at me in confusion; I think they’d not realized I was there the whole time. Before anyone had time to duck for cover, the shark darted down to destroy the romantic scene (technically I’d destroyed it but that’s neither here nor there). Then I nearly screamed when Midorima sent _me_ a sinister grin, grabbed Aomine’s hips, forced their lower halves apart and shoved his lover’s head directly towards the shark’s gaping jaws. It was a knee-jerk reaction to throw myself between the shark and Aomine. My own torso was engulfed by a terrifying mouth filled with rows upon rows of razor-sharp teeth. I was relieved that it didn’t hurt and my body wasn’t harmed, something I’d been assured of by Hanamiya but didn’t quite believe until that moment. When I looked up, I saw just the tips of Midorima’s feet as he swam beyond my sight through the coral. I would have chased after him but I had to dive down to drag an unconscious and rapidly sinking Aomine to the surface, since suddenly both he and I desperately needed to breathe. I’m not sure why he’d lost consciousness. Shock, maybe. He was a dead weight in my arms, and felt more like an anchor than a boy.

I glimpsed another shark looming above us, and panicked for a second. I felt us sinking into the darkness, a freezing, deep black void that I’ve been frightened of since I was a little kid. Then I reminded myself that this was a dream, there were no sharks, that oxygen was unnecessary for a shade anyway, and so I stopped struggling to break through to the surface. Instead, I yelled at him over and over that it was just a dream, it was all just a dream and I was there to help him. The shark’s rough skin brushed against my calves, so I shook his shoulders hard enough to move his head back and forth. When we had descended far enough that all light was lost, his eyes finally snapped open in a flash of blue light that made me jump back.

I blinked and found myself standing on a empty seashore, hair and skin dry, wearing dry clothes I recognised from my own wardrobe. I searched up and down the shore until I found him several meters away, washed up in a sandy pile of seaweed, broken shells and dead jellyfish. As I reached down to pull some seaweed off his face, he turned to cough up salt water and several goldfish (I don’t know what that was about). I introduced myself but he was crying and yelled at me to leave him alone. I persisted though, and gave him a composition book he could use as a journal (it was one of his, the kind he uses for school). I said I would help Midorima fall in love with him, but I would need his help. Then I told him to wake up and write about his dream or else I’d give him a nightmare he wouldn’t be able to forget. He glared at me and I had a feeling he would disobey me. But when he woke up to find his composition book lying next to his bed along with a pen, he seemed to think better of his initial decision.

I’d managed to manoeuvre the book there by requesting help from a local black neko, the domestic kind—Hanamiya and other nekomata seem to have some sort of pact with Earth nekos. Neko-san was annoyed but agreed when I promised him I’d buy him a little cut of fresh toro to celebrate getting my body back after my job was finished (I’ll make Aomine foot the bill for a whole kihada while I’m at it). The twitchy tail swish when Neko-san slipped out the window was so much like Hanamiya sticking his tongue out that I nearly laughed. A shade laughing isn’t funny, though.

The best or worst part is yet to come, though. Before I fulfilled my duties as jaded jinnai komainu, I went on a misadventure that I regret more than anything I’ve ever done in my life.

Around 22-2300, I had been lightly browsing dreams of the local neighborhood while waiting for Aomine to hit REM. It’s kind of like scanning the author and title of a dream shelf. When I feel like it, I enter a boring dream and explore the boundaries of a person's dreamland. In anyone's dream I can skip to a place they're familiar with, such as a shopping district or restaurant. I can walk around a sleeping, empty city, see my feet hit the ground in my favorite tennis shoes, a reflection in storefronts demonstrating that yes, a person named Kanemaru Shinji exists. I can used the tips of my fingers to lightly touch my closed eyelids, wondering when I'll be able to feel the real ones. I can scream and cry out everything I want to yell at Hanamiya and Eijun and no one is the wiser--although Hanamiya will no doubt hear sooner than later if he has any way of doing so. I've never encountered anyone while doing this, since I fly very far away from whatever dream events are going on.

Most of the dream titles were very boring—a salaryman afraid his wife was cheating, a little girl upset she couldn’t buy the phone every other girl in class owned. I’ve been very tempted to enter Eijun’s dreams when I hover around sleeping Seidō sometimes (most every night). I want to invite Eijun to a dream practice with the pros, like maybe the Hanshin Tigers or the Dodgers, so he can squeeze in more practice while still getting all the shuteye he needs to be healthy. Or speak to sports researchers and talk about the methods pros use to avoid injury. I mean, think of the perfect Seidō ace, elbow invulnerable to injury just because his forearm muscles are trained carefully.

Knowing little things will help him in the long run, but god if I could only just talk to him at all. I want him to know he has the ability to be the best pitcher in West Tōkyō, no matter what my feelings toward him are. If it happens in other universes, and it must based on statistical probability, that means it could happen in this one. I mean, Senbatsu is just around the corner, and I want (need) to get him in a good mental position for pitching in the first round. But that seems like a mental rape in some way. He didn’t ask me directly, in person, in this dimension to have sex or anything, although he’s written stuff about being together and being in love blah blah blah.

I don’t give anyone else the same kind treatment. I need data on my targets, so of course I enter dreams without others’ permission. It’s part of the Hanamiya slave full meal deal. But if I have this ability, I have to limit everything to simply viewing dream events and never interfere unless they’re my target. Anything else will get me in trouble.

So anyway, tonight I “accidentally” stumbled across traces of Miyuki’s dream. The bulk of it seemed to focus on the times before both of Us fell asleep, so I was really curious. The Us I speak of will always only be Eijun and I. To me, there is no other possible Us. I hate to admit this, but Hanamiya probably already knows it anyway. While I entered Miyuki’s dream, I attempted to enter the rest of his brain. I was successful, which is something that scared and excited me. What could I do inside there? What secrets was he hiding?

The mental barrier was really strong to someone as new to this as I am. But I was able to slip out a small volume on Miyuki and Eijun. I think it’s because the topic is very emotionally charged and was blinking like a lighthouse through the fog of that strange dream, which had morphed into a fruitless chase after a muddy little golden dog barking in the distance, up a hill covered in rice paddy terraces.

The Eijun section of Miyuki’s memories has it’s own special room.

Because they were in love.

Or at least, Miyuki was. Like, head over heels, but wasn’t willing to admit it for a while. The fact that neither Eijun or I were aware of this after waking up makes me think that Hanamiya or Imayoshi did one or more of the following with our memories:

  * intentionally misplaced the volumes in our own mental memory libraries,
  * stole them, and/or
  * replaced them with fake versions.



Now I face a dual reality that has me extremely pissed off and heartbroken. I interfered with Eijun’s true love. We were never meant to be together.

He’ll go back to Miyuki sooner or later.

I wasn’t kidding when I said that stuff about hurting myself if I ever hurt Eijun. It was fucking rude and just…frankly horrifies me to know that I destroyed his previous relationship like that. He was at the edge of maybe lifelong happiness and then in one daydream I ruined that for both him and a person that I respect (although now I hate that _other_ person to the core of my soul). I mean they weren’t like truly “together” but if Miyuki thought they were, doesn’t that mean Eijun really loved him?

How about I get to the real core of self hatred and throw a fantastic, morbid pity party anyone in Hollywood or Bollywood can enjoy just for the exotic thrill of it all.

Have you ever scoffed at people who threaten suicide and then stop laughing when they turn up in the evening news drowned in their own bath water? If I had a body to kill I’d slit my wrists in a heartbeat. You can laugh now, I know it sounds idiotic and really funny. You won’t be laughing when I hack back into my brain. If all else fails I’ll finish this 8 pair torture fest and then get my new reward of suicide. I guess I could just ask my handler to get rid of me. That might be the easiest way. He’d probably torture me too, so that could be the best method, since I deserve it.

It’s sad to think Eijun has a similar goal but for a different reason. He never needed me, so he shouldn’t feel bad about tossing that ring away, his so called betrayal. The ring’s a fake anyway, without a heart to make his lion live alongside mine. I made a mockery of the ring Miyuki should give him when they’re old enough to understand what marriage means. I didn’t know—had no idea that it could hurt this much, someone cheating on me _in the past_.

At least I have the bitter satisfaction of knowing that Miyuki can’t be Eijun’s twin. We’re either together or broken. Right now we’re broken. Pretty much beyond repair. Too good to be true? Yeah. Goddamn can I get at least a single tear here? I have this almost satanic black aura spewing everywhere like an insane Furuya on crack. I’m half afraid I’ll burn something with this hatred thing. It seems to get worse every night that passes without Eijun beside me. 

Even if I did regain my body, and didn't kill myself, I would have a terrible time finishing the season if the two lovebirds got back together. So keep that in mind, Hanamiya. One of the 16 pairs will have to fill in for Eijun and I. I'll refuse to work with him if he only wants to be friends. Okay so I need to get his side of the story, true, but Miyuki's memories won't lie. 

At the bare minimum, I need to be at Senbatsu with him, ask him who he'd pick if he had to choose between Miyuki or myself. Is that really too much to ask for? 

It's much easier to just die, though.

So I lied about the location thing. I’m actually hovering outside Miyuki’s room, wondering if Eijun will visit. I’ve been giving my captain nightmares recently just to get some revenge. It’s all I have left.

The alternative is to hover around Eijun’s room instead. I’ll go do that later as well.

Why does Hanamiya let me read parts of Eijun’s own journal when all it contains are the same kind of sad revelations that show how we can never be together? When will he stop questioning whether my love for him is a memory, or mark of insanity? By the time I finish this, he’ll have returned to his natural place beside that perfectly nasty damn pretty boy.

Why am I trying so hard to make Us work if it’s something that was doomed from the beginning? Is this the way Hanamiya is truly torturing me before laying down the axe? Imayoshi warned me that my handler was sadistic. I didn’t realize it could be this bad.

I’m pretty sure the last two komainu killed themselves. Imayoshi wouldn’t answer me when I asked him who the last pair was.

Let’s proceed to the complete motherfucking Tōō log used as an Iron Maiden for me:

**Jinnai komainu (om) Observation Log 2.0**

**location.** Tōō Academy

 **target profile.** 1-A

 **name**.  青峰 大輝 Aomine Daiki

 **zodiac sign.** 寅 tora. 1998 kids are toradoshi, year of the tiger. About.com-sensei says Aomine should be “sensitive, stubborn, short-tempered, courageous, selfish and slightly mean, but also and a deep thinker capable of great sympathy for those he loves.” Ok this is why I don’t believe in superstitious nonsense. He is, in no way, a deep thinker or sensitive. But it’s also funny because this whole thing makes me think of that saying, 前門の虎項後門の狼, zenmon no tora, koumon no ookami, between the devil and the deep blue sea. Well, if Hanamiya is the devil and Aomine is deep and blue, I’m basically screwed.

 **blood type compatibility with komainu twin.** to be discussed later

 **astrological sign.**  Virgo. Can’t believe how ridiculous astrology can be. According to Wikipedia-sensei, “Astrologers ascribe certain personal traits to a person born under the Virgo, including being practical, impassive, and discriminating. According to astrologers, Virgos tend to worry about the little things and are very good at detailed work. They are also known for being **modest, faithful, quiet, and very persuasive, as well as a good sense of reasoning and memory. Virgos are also known for their intellect and usually enjoy art, literature, science and mathematics**.” That’s so much bullshit. From what I’ve seen, Aomine has as much talent in math as I have in basketball.

Hanamiya, you’ll probably like this part. I love finding all this crap in astrologer’s dreams. There’s this guy that writes for a website called homostrology, and he told me virgo gay men are delicate flowers, impossible to please, compulsively critical, irritated by small things, are cat lovers, so controlling they would be doms and not subs, hate messes and poor hygiene, so be prepared to wipe up immediately after getting it on. I have no idea how true any of that is for this Smurf giant, but he doesn’t seem bothered by dirty laundry and his wet dreams definitely don’t focus on cleanliness. Best quote from the homostrologist: “virgos, like elephants, never forget.”

 **team.** Vorpal Swords

Here’s the quick and dirty edition of my notes. The characters in his name have the following individual significance:

青/ao/blue, green (Japanese); blue-green (Chinese) — indicating possible compatibility with komainu partner; immature, unripe, young (as prefix)—of course, he’s an immature NBA-style Smurf.

峰/mine/peak; summit; ridge; top or back of a blade—meaning he’s the best at what he does, is tall or both, while also being smooth and hard as a blade, always ready to fight/defend (always ready to play basketball or get in a fight); a sword discriminates who and what is good/bad, right/wrong, winner/loser, so as the back of a blade he will be key for the win or loss of a game, and also demonstrates whose talent is up to snuff and who needs to work on their game (Kagami Taiga). Another interpretation being that as the back of a blade, he is the bedrock of a team named Vorpal Swords. Without Aomine, his team isn’t as strong, since they should have a weapon like Aomine to live up to the meaning of their team’s name. Oh last interpretation is that as a blade, he’s set aside until needed for use, so lots of naps are kind of in his line of duty as blade. People use blades then clean them carefully before setting them back in sheaths. They don’t take them to school and try to teach them stuff that will never enter the blade’s nonexistent head. Maybe he’s designed to be an idiot in school itself? Just speculation.

大/dai/large—from what I can tell, he’s large in both senses

輝/ki/when doubled, this means brilliance, so Daiki basically means big shiny guy, and it makes sense because Aomine’s beauty and talent shines beyond most Smurfs. He’s a jerk, though. Why isn’t the jerk part in his name? Oh, I guess that might be why I’m here to get him back to his origin as clean cut sword—someone that is supportive, ready to play ball but not necessarily a dagger that needles people in their sides. That’s more of a Hanamiya characteristic. His name’s relationship to his team: swords. Probably means his team is marked above and better than the rest, as one would cut the chaff from the wheat.

Aomine Daiki. God I hate him sometimes. Then again, I don’t enjoy anything now.

Well, I take that back. I’m getting used to the badass power of a shade to speak in his “mind,” that is, ask him ever so nicely to share brain space (not steal it!). It freaks him out enough that I can make him search the net for my research, and the best part is looking up Wikipedia articles on homostrology and basically take out my frustration on him. Oh, wait, I’m doing the same thing Hanamiya is doing, aren’t I? There’s no other explanation…

Well, let’s get the fun part of this show on the road. You have no idea how difficult it was to get him to just write the following halfass log. I don’t need an essay, I just need his real thoughts, something I don’t have to go around searching for in his mind library, since _I’m not evil_ and consider that a violation of privacy. Okay maybe I’m a little evil, but only where Miyuki is concerned.

* * *

**Aomine Daiki**

**Log for Kanemaru Shinji** No. 1

 **time.** 00時20分 12:20 am

 **date.** 2015 年5月9日(土) 9 May 2015 (Saturday)

Umm so I don’t know what to write here. why am I writing this? just because I sleep during class doesn’t mean I wanna wake up in the middle of the night just to write about this. besides if anyone sees this they’ll think i’m insane

i mean i promise i won’t forget, can i just wait till morning to write this…i can hardly see the lines on this paper. shit.

So yeah there’s a kid named Kanemaru who talked to me in a freakyass dream tonight, handed me something to write in, when I woke up the book was there. like, a real one.

now there’s a black cat sitting on my bed. as if I’m watching a fucking horror flick.

I know, right, it’s so weird. kanemaru is this tiny blond kid, claims he plays baseball in some famous high school in Kokubunji--starts with Sei…forgot the rest. I haven’t heard of it, it can’t be that great.

Hmm I guess if he can help me tho i don’t mind doing this log thing so much, but if it turns out to be useless I’m gonna punch his little gnome face. that is, if he has a real face and i’m not crazy.

i hate saying what i need help with.

it’s really embarrassing i don’t think i can

don’t make me do this

* * *

**Miyuki Kazuya**

**Captain’s Log** No. 16

 **time.** 05時30分 5:30 am

 **date.** 2015 年5月9日(土) 9 May 2015 (Saturday)

I’m really enjoying typing “Captain’s Log” so I’m going to keep using it in my sometimes-when I-have-time diary until I graduate. Maybe after then, too, as a nostalgic reminder of golden days long past? I have no idea how long I’ll be playing baseball at this level—I hope to play in college and eventually go pro but you never know, I could find a good woman and have 1.5 dogs and/or 1.5 children. Or I could get a loud pitcher to fall for me, go to college together here, and then pro in the US, where we could legally get married and have 3.5 adopted children (in my opinion, the more the merrier).

Currently, it looks like I have a better chance of going pro in football than getting a single kiss from Sawamura (it would be French, you know, it has to be or else it doesn’t really count). Until about a month ago, I’d been expecting a stuttering confession from my ridiculously cute kōhai at any time—hopefully sooner than later. Why it seemed natural for him to confess, and not the other way around, might have been a sign of things to come…

Anyway my not-so-subtle hints had finally broken through his thick (but cute, always cute) skull and he’d blush every time I casually touched him. I’d thoughtfully prepared a plan of initial rejection followed by tortuous unrequited nonsense until one day I’d make my own dramatic confession on bended knee, complete with a single red rose. It was all going so well, my plan was so perfect.

It’s sad to admit, but I’d actually gone out to buy a *cough* large bottle of lube and some XL condoms along with the moral support of Mochi and his barely contained hyena laugh. The cashier was blushing, and the poor girl gave me the wrong change; when I pointed the mistake out she almost cried. I wasn’t concerned with either reaction because in my opinion it’s better to be honest than to try and act like I don’t know what size is going to break around my, well, you know what I’m talking about. Then, in a bookstore that Jun and Sawamura go to for shōjo manga, I bought a manual on gay sex. Yes, I know there’s a magical place called the internet but ebooks and short articles can’t be dog-eared, whole paragraphs marked with bright highlighters or lewd notes/jokes jotted down in the margin. Mostly I looked forward to him hiding his head in my shoulder in embarrassment and mumbling something about which position he wouldn’t mind trying.

People were grinning at me every time my pitcher gave me the patented puppy dog eyes and that was probably the best feeling I’d had in a long time. Everyone just really liked me, because the sweetest thing in Tōkyō had chosen me over every other girl and boy in town—even above his childhood friend. It was also something of an honour, because even though he hadn’t won any awards for pitching (yet) he was practically Kantō’s Mr. Congeniality and a person _everyone_ wanted to play baseball with (no matter what they said aloud). That meant that if he saw something worthwhile in me, aside from baseball, wasn’t I a human after all? Because being called Damn Pretty Boy doesn’t sound particularly malicious, but Sawamura has taught me that the _way_ you treat your teammates is just as important (if not more) as how many games you win.

* * *

  **Aomine Daiki**

 **Log for Kanemaru Shinji** No. 2

 **time.** 10時00分 10:00 am

 **date.** 2015 年5月9日(土) 9 May 2015 (Saturday)

he threatened me with a nightmare, and I didn’t listen to him. guess what last night i dreamt that my right hand was bitten off by like one of those little hairy guys you know the kind in that rings movie. it was something like how the ring finger was bitten by that slimy CGI dude. EXCEPT SLIMY CGI DUDE BIT OFF MY WHOLE RIGHT HAND. i don’t remember if CGI is green screen or blue but that’s kind of nice if you think how midorima has cute green hair and mine is blue—

uh so i just admitted i like midorima and i think that’s enough for now

\---

**Aomine Daiki**

**Log for Kanemaru** No. 3

 **time.** 20時30分 8:30 pm

 **date.** 2015 年5月9日(土) 9 May 2015 (Saturday)

so…what i like about midorima. well, he’s got a nice ass. it has that perfect round but hard “please touch me” quality about it. i saw him naked a bunch in teikō but i think he’s gotten bigger since then. either way i bet his dick is nice too. like, big enough to, you know. and those cute fingers that are always saying, “let me readjust my glasses please, since it gives you a boner and i like to piss you off.” god, i can almost feel those fingers, tape off and in my mouth, then somewhere else, will he ever ever let me?

okay more than just sex, he’s…honest, fair, smart (we’d be like rice and chopsticks, one needs the other). his full-court shots are insane. he spends more time with a basketball in his hand than i do sleeping on the school roof (a lot). i respect that, a little…he loves basketball enough to make it his entire life. our style is almost the complete opposite but i like that about him, he’s gotten good enough that he can be a real challenge.

but, if i tell him he’ll be disgusted and refuse to play in any games with me. more than probably hating bi people, there are some small problems, such as him being straight and thinking I’m retarded. i probably don’t have the right blood type and his oha asshat thing predicts he just can’t get it up, I’m too ugly, he needs someone with Satsuki’s rack and Takao’s blind obedience. what’s the point of this whole thing. it’d never work. he already prefers hanging out with his little bitch Takao. i don’t want him to hate me, he already leaves me alone and always has. what if he’s so uncomfortable he moves to like America to get away from me? because knowing he’s in the same city is, how do you say…it just feels good. let’s put it this way, if I couldn’t take the train to see him it’d freak me out. it would be nice, i suppose, to get his attention even if it’s like friendlier on the court.

i hate you kanemaru.

can you just make him fall for me please?

* * *

  **Miyuki Kazuya**

 **Captain’s Log** No. 17

 **time.** 05時45分 5:45 am

 **date.** 2015 年5月10日(日) 10 May 2015 (Sunday)

God I really need to get this off my chest. I’m wasting time writing this but it’s been messing with my head and I have to tell someone, smartphone is as good as anyone in real life. At least, a phone is all I can trust right now—my screwed up brain seems to be making rivals out of everyone I thought were friends.

So.

Whatever gossip about me dating boys previously is complete BS. Before I fell for Puppymura I’d never even considered the idea of kissing boys. A little fun with a girl now and then was sort of expected, but not really something I could relax and enjoy because I was so tired and already had a lot of responsibility when my senpai got injured. I eventually decided to eliminate real love from my radar. _I’m too young to date. It would distract me from baseball,_ I said to myself. _I have a terrible personality and there’s no point. It never works out in the end._ I deliberately avoided thinking about my parents. Don’t believe anyone when they say I don’t have a heart, or that I only think about baseball. I’d be the first person to raise their hand in a Catcher’s Anonymous club if asked whether baseball was a means to avoid talking or thinking about things better left unspoken.

The best thing about Sawamura was (is? I hate the question mark) that he understood how painful it was (still is) for me to give up plans I never thought I had until I knew I could lose them. He knew that I’d miss the opportunity to have a dainty arm tucked within my own, small smooth fingers proudly engulfed in my own. I’d miss that standard selfie, painfully bright smiles in order to verify that yes, it’s not a joke when the world sees a public post, “Miyuki Kazuya is now in a relationship with So-and-so.” He also knew that any moment I could meet her at this school or the next, that generic girl you see sometimes out of the corner of your eye, long shiny hair, spotless pale skin, tinkling laughter and thick eyelashes—someone so quintessentially feminine that if I stopped for a second to actually look her straight in the eye, I would belong to her in 3 seconds flat. Both Sawamura and I could easily imagine a diamond jeweller’s display, chunk of diamond and platinum gold worth five times my monthly salary, sunny wedding day with birds singing and cherry blossoms falling in our hair. Most of all, there would be an empty hole in my life that could be filled by a pregnant belly swollen with the first of my 1.5 biological children, the first tears I’ve cried since a small child, but this time with joy when I see a tiny chubby hand clutch my thumb, little fist filled with a miniature baseball well before he’s able to grasp a spoon (he will be a catcher).

A few months after I realized the person I loved was not a woman, and the inevitable implications of that, I had a nightmare of a hospital neonatal waiting room where I paced back and forth anxiously like any other expectant father. In my dream I was scared but incredibly happy—the kind of happy you only get to experience a few times in your life. It was a hundred times better than winning any baseball tournament. I felt that briefly until a doctor came out of the surgery, approached me with a frown and said _Sir, the woman you speak of does not exist, would you please leave the premises._ Truth be told, that nightmare still visits me from time to time.

* * *

**Aomine Daiki**

**Log for Kanemaru** No. 4

 **time.** 02時10分 2:10 am

 **date.** 2015 年5月11日(月) 11 May 2015 (Monday)

ok this dream was fucking…perfect. maybe it’s a good sign? i’m just glad he didn’t try to kill me like in that first dream you spoke to me in. so in this dream, i played with midorima in a real practice game against Shutoku. he was so fucking sexy and i couldn’t help myself. it wasn’t that difficult, i have you to thank kanemaru, i guess all this is paying off….i just treated him like any chick that i flirt with…it’s stupid and i’m probably blushing but god, this stupid log!

okay so the game went well, i played a little slow and let them win so that he’d feel manlier or something. like you know, on top. i was sweaty as usual, so it didn’t freak anyone out when i pulled off my shirt and wiped my face with it. it was classic, the way he looked at me…wish I’d gotten a dream picture. lol. cuz i just jerked off to the look on his face when I winked at him.

Yes.

I winked at him.

and………………..

he blushed.

Could it really be that easy? Maybe i need to find out for myself?

* * *

**Miyuki Kazuya**

**Captain’s Log** No. 18

 **time.** 04時00分 4:00 am

 **date.** 2015 年5月11日(月) 11 May 2015 (Monday)

What’s my goddamn problem these days? Why is this crap bothering me so much? I have the responsibility to lead my team to victory this year and there’s no way I can keep adding to this rambling mess without there being even more repercussions. Every time I write it seems to get worse. Still, I know that without this I’d probably explode from frustration.

Topic of the day: Why doesn’t Sawamura remember what we had together? Because it’s obvious something is missing there, something significant. Did he have a concussion that I’m unaware of?

Despite my fear and confusion, I can’t stop wanting him, no matter how much I try. That’s unchanged, but why the hell has Sawamura changed so much? Is it because we had nothing really solid to begin with?

At some point we’d developed an unspoken agreement to not speak of our attraction for each other, while also promising an odd sort of fidelity. Because both of us acknowledged that, silently, never needing to voice what was in our hearts, that I would never be able to forget my favorite battery partner, would always need to play with him the way everyone else needs oxygen to breathe (such a terrible metaphor, I’ll never say it in public).

Clever in his own way, Sawamura especially knew that I didn’t want a delicate lacy wedding gown trailing from the feather-light person I carried across our wedding threshold. Instead, he foresaw a future where I wanted to struggle to carry a loud, slightly annoying but utterly sweet (delicious) man in my arms, me complaining the whole way that said man must have gained weight and should probably be put on a diet of one less bowl of rice with twice as much sex. So maybe we’d be out as a couple openly or maybe we’d keep it between those closest to us. The point is that we’d be together, we’d wear rings that meant we promised to stay together until we died, and generally enjoy the life of people meant to have a happily ever after.

I used to occasionally see, in startling clarity, a challenging look that said, _J_ _ust go ahead and ask me out you coward, you know what the answer will be_ **.** I felt like a complete hypocrite for encouraging his confidence on the field while hiding behind the hollow facade of Captain. I was using baseball to avoid getting closer to him. Mochi knew this, and yelled at me for it from time to time, especially when Sawamura ran in the rain for too long. It kills me to think he could’ve been crying because of my cowardice.

Of course I know we’re just kids. I think of that every day, wondering when I can just grow the fuck up and tell everyone about the person I want to be. Of course I know it’s way too soon to make important life decisions like promising myself to a boy before even kissing or actually telling him about my feelings. But there are people you meet in life that are simply right for you immediately, whether you figure it out at once (me) or much later (him). If you let those people go, at whatever age, you end up becoming sad, sterile husks of the people you can be, forever wondering would could have been. That’s where I am now. At the beginning of what could have been.

* * *

**Miyuki Kazuya**

**Captain’s Log** No. 19

 **time.** 05時00分 5:00 am

 **date.** 2015 年5月11日(月) 11 May 2015 (Monday)

Love troubles, continued. I can’t sleep, I should be getting the last dregs of any sleep I can eek out but I can only think about Sawamura. Today I’m going to be even more tired, sore, and irritable than usual.

So, I’ll pick up where I left off. I guess the perfect Miyuki and Sawamura couple isn’t meant to be? Have I just been lucky, overconfident, and most importantly, complacent for too long? I’ve assumed he would always be there for me, exclusively for me, through thick and thin, without question. I assumed that the attention I gave him on the field was enough to keep him eagerly bouncing around my feet like an adorable puppy that nips at your heels when you don’t take it on walkies. I didn’t realize that almost-boyfriends are the same as almost-girlfriends in that they need a little more than secret glances, friendly pats with a mitt or lewd glances in the baths to be satisfied. I failed to see that my cowardice could enable the destruction of an almost-relationship by random acts of a malevolent god (the anti-god, if you will, something who loves torturing people with a history of losing the most important people in their lives).

I don’t remember the exact day or time it happened, but I do recall that one day at breakfast he was sitting close to me, in a slightly territorial way, leg pressed up against mine and hand occasionally (deliberately) brushing down my thigh (that was definitely intentional, I’m certain of it). He had this sly little grin that said he knew every single movement sent little electric pulses through my chest and down my spine. But he was still that fluffy ball of energy that, for all his posturing as “love god,” (I’d actually overheard him say that—I couldn’t stop laughing for at least a half an hour) when he saw me partially naked his entire body would become a blushing red beacon of embarrassment. I almost chuckled when he sent Furuya a blistering glare as the other pitcher made the sin of opening his mouth—as if I’d ever “change teams” for someone as stiff and quiet as that poor boy. The jealousy made me happy, excited almost, because didn’t that mean Sawamura saw me as his own? And that we were in complete agreement on who belonged to whom? More importantly, he wasn’t afraid to announce to everyone that I was his and he was mine. I was so proud of him, and probably more turned on than someone about to go play baseball had any right to be.

Shit, I have hide this to seem like I’m asleep and acting all captainy. Damn Okumura and his tiny bladder.

* * *

**Aomine Daiki**

**Log for Kanemaru** No. 5

 **time.** 15時50分 3:50 pm

 **date.** 2015 年5月12日(月) 11 May 2015 (Monday)

the blush, that was definitely a good sign. kanemaru, thanks for the info via midorima’s dreams — i hope for your sake you didn’t give him a nightmare .

i forced takao to give me midorima’s cell number, i’d never had it before. wanted it, couldn’t figure out how to get it. turns out takao will really just do what you tell him to do.

haven’t been brave enough to text midorima yet.

* * *

**Miyuki Kazuya**

**Captain’s Log** No. 20

 **time.** 21時00分 9:00 pm

 **date.** 2015 年5月11日(月) 11 May 2015 (Monday)

Well I just got a few minutes so I can continue where i left off at the before Not-Sawamura.

Picture that perfect boy, clever in love and so very inexperienced (but also cute, of course) in true competitive baseball. Now picture me at dinner that night, watching a mutated version of him standing in line for food without so much as greeting me or at least saying something loud and obnoxious about his shitty senpai (senpai being a thinly veiled word for the person he has a crush on). No, this person was Sawamura but also Not-Sawamura, someone that seemed all at once older, wiser, stronger, and impossibly sexier than the boy I’d flirted with only hours ago. Yes, his face was the same, every physical aspect an exact copy. But he was not _my_ Sawamura.

How did I know? He didn’t seek my eyes out first thing, run to make sure he was seated next to me, or glare at his rival when Furuya asked for additional pitching practice. He almost looked like he wanted to cry, but there was no obvious reason he could be sad.

Then my teddy bear (god I finally said it. i apologize) didn’t even sit at my table. I actually witnessed him sit down across from Okumura. **OKUMURA**. That both shocked and infuriated me. I wasn’t angry at Sawamura, but I was astounded that a first year was getting priority over me. I mean, everyone knew I’d be receiving a confession any day now. It was inevitable. **EVERYONE KNEW IT** so why wasn’t Okumura abiding by the Seidō unwritten rules of romance? One did not touch what one did not own. Sawamura did not belong to Okumura, never would and I would make damn sure of it. What had the blond (should be bimbo, I bet) done to deserve special attention that should by all rights be reserved especially for me alone?

That night Sawamura was tense and quiet, keeping his eyes on his bowl and chopsticks. The only person he looked up at from time to time was seated at a different table. I couldn’t help myself, and stared at the person who now held my pitcher’s interest. I studied the group of people he favoured over me, and was blown away to see he was concentrated on a table including Nabe, Kanemaru and Tōjō. I’d never seen any of the three show an interest in the same sex.

What did this mean? Had I fallen so hard that I now suspected Sawamura and everyone he looked at in romantic terms? The answer to the latter was basically yes. I felt lost, confused—what had I done? Worse than the feeling of abandonment was sheer terror. Had my worst nightmare come true? I’d realised how much I’d come to depend on his reassuring presence surrounding and supporting me, no matter our location. We could be separated by nearly 20 metres and I’d still feel some kind of (disturbingly romantic) warm feeling from the top of my head to the soles of my feet. That evening, I started shivering. I’m now pretty sure my body had realized that the Sawamura of that morning was not the same person as the Sawamura of the evening.

* * *

**Aomine Daiki**

**Log for Kanemaru** No. 6

 **time.** 06時35分 6:35 am

 **date.** 2015 年5月11日(火) 12 May 2015 (Tuesday)

this is the strangest dream so far, and is basically a phone dream. All of this is really just clear as day in my mind, the words, sounds, feelings. if i didn’t know any better i’d say this actually happened in real life. but that can’t be true, right? so here it is, all the embarrassing details.

…it starts with me texting Midorima, which is actually possible now I got his number off Takao. and yeah, the name on my phone is carrot-chan because, dude he’s totally a carrot in that fugly Shutoku outfit but after picturing him as a giant carrot, it made me wanna see him in like a little bunny outfit with fishnet tights and heels and a whip so the chan makes me think of little bunny you get me? hey, no one ever said i wanted to be the neko **all** the time. besides, bunnies in fishnets can spank me just as easily as women in fishnets could. anyway, here’re the texts:

 **me:** hey

I get all of two seconds and then, bam—

 **carrot-chan:** Who is this?

don't you hate it when you get a fast text response but have no idea what to say? yeah. me too. i typed the first thing i could think of, then quickly regretted it

 **me:** a serial killer

 **carrot-chan:** Just go die, Aomine

 **me:** takao told u right

 **carrot-chan:** Takao tells me everything

 **me:** yeah? what did he tell u?

 **carrot-chan:** That you probably have a crush on me

I can’t breathe. I try to, but it’s just not happening. 10 seconds later:

 **carrot-chan:** Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.

I finally choke, a half-cry that i will never ever ever admit is even remotely close to crying. I’m so embarrassed and well…sad, that I don’t reply, just stare down at my phone like it doesn’t belong to me, i’ve never seen this phone before, so this message can’t be addressed to me, it’s a message for a different Aomine Daiki.

of course, i should’ve known that little shit takao would do something like this. it was too easy. nothing in life is free.

then i throw a tantrum and delete Midorima’s contact information.

i’m so pissed off and embarrassed that I have to go running for over an hour, just straight up running, not even basketball. i only stop because my angry mood playlist gets boring. back at home i take a shower, still feeling really pissy. i’m so tired i’ve almost forgotten the text disaster until i see there’re 10 new messages waiting for me from an unknown number. the only number i don’t know but used to belongs to someone i don’t ever want to see again. i don’t save the contact info, but i’m curious so i read through the list like i’m reading a eulogy at a funeral. yeah. in the dream i was really overdramatic.

at first Midorima waited for like 15 minutes and then started texting like crazy.

 **unknown number:** Was your plan to just annoy me? Because it’s working.

5 minutes later:

 **unknown number:** Look, it’s not a problem for me. It won’t change anything between us.

That makes me want to crush my phone in my fist. Third text, 3 minutes later:

 **unknown number:** Why would you bother to text me if you won’t finish what you started?

2 minutes later:

 **unknown number:** Are you okay?

30 seconds later:

 **unknown number:** Not that I’m worried about you.

That makes me smile a little. the carrot can be cute sometimes. Next text comes 1 minute later:

 **unknown number:** I don’t understand this, Oha Asa predicted that this would be a very auspicious day for me.

i try not to be interested at the next text

 **unknown number:** I was wondering when you’d text me.

i guess you could say my heart was beating a little faster when i read, all sent in fast succession:

 **unknown number:** Can you just text something please?

 **unknown number:** Anything????

 **unknown number:** Don’t make me come over there and—

I have to know what he’d do if he was here next to me, wet and just out of a shower we’ve taken together.

 **me:** what? tell me what you’d do

the response is immediate and i laugh harder than I have in weeks

 **unknown number:**  Break your fingers one by one, baka!

i still feel a bit raw at the thought of him saying nothing would change between us. i go back over the texts he sent and a suspicion forms in the back of my mind. i weigh the pros and cons of acting on impulse, then decide i’ve got nothing to lose

 **me:** i’m not the idiot if you've known me this long and expected me to make the first move

immediate response

 **unknown number:** Maybe.

This is actually a lot of fun. i think i have the upper hand here…

 **me:** tell me something that will make me create a contact for Midorima Shintarō instead of leaving it as unknown number

i take a deep breath, put the phone down, get dressed slowly, prepare to leave the house. tell myself, i’m going out, i don’t care where, i have too much nervous energy, but i need some food asap. i wander over to maji burger, order a plate of burgers and wonder if kagami can run as long and fast as I did and if so, how many burgers he’d order after.

once I'm home, i look at the phone again, see he’s texted

 **unknown number:** Takao found your number for me months ago through Kuroko but since he had to shop at the Chibi Gossip Store I felt like a complete ass. Now the blue elf knows, I’ll never be able to live it down.

I don’t know what to make of this. I feel a bit pissed that Midorima calls Kuroko a blue elf. I played with the kid, he's more than a pretty elf. Okay, so he's not my elf anymore but you know what i mean. now i'm calling him elf and that pisses me off more. but i'm also curious about what exactly midorima has been hiding from me for months.

 **me:** what does kuroko know about you that i don’t?

There’s silence for 5 minutes and i get a taste of my own medicine. i briefly considered blocking his phone number.

 **me:** look, why don’t we just shoot some hoops and talk about it then? this sunday?

i seriously want to punch him after the next text

 **unknown number:** Let me consult Oha Asa.

 **me:** what the flying fuck

 **unknown number:** Swearing is unattractive

 **me:** …..

 **unknown number:** Not that I think you’re attractive.

 **me:** …..

I save his contact info.

 **my carrot:** I hate you

i swear using all the cuss words i know in four languages.

 **me:** i know that well enough

i turn off my phone and resolve to never speak his name again, instead call him the Carrot Who Shall Not Be Named.

Next day, I decide to go out and shoot some hoops with Kagami. He’s not so bad, kind of annoying sometimes but we mesh pretty well on the court. i can’t always anticipate how he’ll block me, can’t jump as high as him when he really gets into that “i won’t ever let Aomine beat me no matter how much it hurts” mode, the streetball we learned is ever so slightly different, and, well, i like to tease him.

so i have to turn on my phone in order to text him. kagami’s down for it, tells me he’ll be at the park in an hour. i see a handful of messages from the Carrot Who Shall Not Be Named but ignore them fairly easily. tell myself it doesn’t matter. i have kagami and i don’t really need the Carrot Who Shall Not Be Named anyway, i mean who wants a carrot when they can have a tiger? not that i have a thing for bakagami. he's straight, and have u seen his eyebrows? there’s enough for a party of three.

so kagami and i end up playing a fast and furious game in which i try to get rid of Carrot Who Shall Not Be Named thoughts. it works pretty well, my focus is terrible at first but gets better after that damn redhead scores 4 points off me and the whole thing starts to feel like that nightmare kanemaru saved me from (i never said thank you. i should have— it was the worst thing i’d ever been through, and i won’t ever forget…thank you.)

now you’ll think, why is Aomine being all deep n’ shit…but the only thing I’ve ever actually _wanted_ to talk about is basketball, after all…

there’s a sort of healing feeling on the court that i can’t find anywhere else. it’s best when i play one on one because i can focus better. when everywhere else feels numb, boring, slow, on the court i feel alive. it’s where i feel most comfortable, a home that i can take anywhere with me and my gym bag. it doesn’t matter so much who i play with, but it helps if i know the people enough to get a rhythm going. you can’t tell when you watch from the sidelines, but what looks like dribbling, fadeaways, blocks, layups, rebounds, movement that stops and starts aren’t actually something i separate, body or mind. it’s all one loop, a river that has waterfalls, shallows, and rapids but in the end are the same thing. yeah, it really is a river i can swim along. but i control it, not the other way around, i suppose you could say i’m the water? yeah…i’m the water, and everyone else has to bend around me. huh. that’s too deep for aomine daiki. i’m not made for thinking, after all. i’ve believed that all my life but kanemaru said i need more than basketball to convince the Carrot Who Shall Not Be Named i’m interesting. not that i want the Carrot anyway.

so yeah, i was actually thinking about all of that in the dream—freaky, right?

then i hear my phone ring, a dream phone that startles me enough that i let kagami make a clear half-court shot (this is definitely a dream). we were even and now he’s ahead by 3 so I’m pissed at whoever interrupted us. i’m expecting Satsuki to call because in a few hours I’ll join her standard shopping trip, unscheduled but something i have to do anyway. i look at kagami and he shrugs, obviously a little disappointed, and honestly, so am i.

i jog over to where i dropped my bag and look at the caller id. unknown number. the phone keeps ringing. my hands start to shake, i’m either angry or sad or lonely i have no idea what. i’m definitely, definitely definitely completely and in no way trying to hide tears. i hear kagami approaching from behind. the ringing stops. begins again. i feel kagami’s hand on my shoulder, i have to turn away and wipe away water that is sweat and i’ll never ever call tears.

i’m not a baby, but i don’t push kagami away. instead, i accept the call and another phone game begins, this time with kagami seated on the bench next to me, doing nice shit like handing me a towel in lieu of tissues for not-tears and a water bottle and everything a real friend does. the kind of friend that could turn into something more.

i say, “whaddya you need?”

Carrot says, “Just…”

“spit it out, Midorima, I’m busy.” i'm not technically busy but so what. i’m angry enough that i put the Carrot Who Shall Not Be Named on speakerphone to show kagami what an ass the Carrot is, even more of an ass than i thought he could be.

Kagami looks up at me with one of the double eyebrows raised in surprise. i laugh at him a little. i probably sound nervous.

“I’ll play one on one this weekend, Oha Asa predicts that on Sunday my meetings are best in the afternoon.” Carrot sounds a little flustered maybe.

i glare down at my phone. i’m silent for a moment because i wanna punch something with green hair. in the balls.

i feel better when kagami starts to laugh really hard. then i can’t help but laugh too, I'm not sure why, but it feels good. we spend like maybe five minutes that way, holding our sides and my stomach's starting to hurt, people passing by looking at us strange.

i hear the carrot yell, “Goddamn you Aomine am I on speakerphone? Who is that?” he sounds a little hurt, a bit on the maybe about-to-cry-ish side. i imagine his constipated look, the one he gets when he loses to Seirin.

Eyebrow-kun and I look at each other and sober up. maybe we were being cruel.

before i have a chance to speak, the phone is grabbed out of my hand. “It’s Kagami,” the redheaded idiot says. “Aomine’s already _playing_ with me right now so he doesn’t need you.” he makes it sound lewd and both of start in on another round of laughter, this time hard enough that we really wanna roll on the floor and my stomach is hurting even worse. i just can’t help it. the idea of me kissing kagami is about as appealing as licking fry sauce off the maji burger floor. at least, that’s what i tell myself now. sometimes the truth of what i say changes over time, though. that makes my laughter die down a little.

I take back my phone after a couple minutes and I’m surprised to see the Carrot Who Shall Not Be Named had the patience to wait for our giggles to stop. Then he says all deep and evil like (a bit sexy though), “Kagami, if you touch him I swear I’ll tell Kuroko your dirty little secret.”

kagami’s face turns red then green then white. “whaa???” his mouth is opening and closing like that guy on the planet of the apes, but with the tv on mute.

oi, what’s this now? what could be considered a dirty secret for this idiot?

“Takao dug up a little dirt on you for me. Just in case.” the carrot sounds increasingly evil. i like it for some reason. i try not to think about why. wrong time, wrong place.

“Just in case what!?” I yell.

“Just in case he tries to take you!”

The silence after Midorima’s statement is really awkward. i think: he's now a human and not a root vegetable after all. i don't know what kagami thinks, but he turns 5 different shades of red. i count them.

i feel guilty somehow.

I turn the speakerphone off and walk out of hearing range. “if you'd start listening to me instead of  _Oha Asshat_  then maybe Kagami won’t take me!”

“I didn’t know you wanted to be taken!” there's true surprise in his voice, i wonder if he really knows what i want.

“yes. taken.” i think about the courage it took for kuroko to stand up to me, time after time, believing in that impossible dream, himself and his team. there’s no reason why i can’t say a few words when my tiny friend can face down an entire army of boys stronger and taller than him, then emerge victor. “taken with a collar, leash, rope, whatever i can get. whatever _you_ can get.”

more silence. disturbing silence. something you’d hear in a cemetery.

a year passes. a decade. probably 3 minutes.

then he says, “you’re talking to that guy, aren’t you.”

i’m a bit relieved that i’m not crazy. more than relieved. “kanemaru.”

“Yes, the blond midget.” i have to laugh a little at the comparison because yeah, kanemaru compared to midorima is pretty much a midget to a giant, one of the little hairy guys to humans in the rings movie.

“i think he looks more like a gnome.” more silence. i practice biting my lip. “well?” i glance back at kagami, who’s on the phone too, looking uncomfortable and embarrassed as well. hopefully for a different reason.

“I can probably do that.”

i almost punch the chain link fence, i’m so happy. but i don’t, i need my hands too much.

then i realize i don’t actually know what he’s thinking, his voice sounded too calm. was it a “fuck yeah i’m down for that” probably or a “well if i must, let’s get this over with” probably?

“yeah?” i need to make sure he understands what i need. because i’m sure i need more than kagami can give me, if kagami would ever be willing to be with a guy, if I’d ever be able to get over his hideous eyebrows. “have you thought about it?”

“Yes.” the voice is a little more strained now.

“How often?” i really want to push him here, maybe i had a tantrum but i need to know if i can trust him.

he doesn’t hesitate. “Every other minute.” he pauses and adds, “in between i have to stop to breathe then readjust.”

i can’t stop the laughter again, and i think that maybe if he’s making me laugh this much in such a short amount of time, then it’s a good sign for us. maybe there will actually be an us.

then i wake up and write this, thinking, my writing has gotten better since i started this shit with kanemaru. now if only real life imitated dreams.

i think i might know how to avoid tantrums though.

* * *

**Miyuki Kazuya**

**Captain’s Log** No. 21

 **time.** 21時45分 9:45 pm

 **date.** 2015 年5月12日(火) 12 May 2015 (Tuesday)

So in my last log, I didn’t get time to finish the explanation of Sawamura’s weird change, which I first witnessed at dinner.

Okay, so at dinner I was confused, and tried to tell myself he was playing hard to get. For the rest of our time in the dining hall I found myself staring at him, basically willing him to just send me a grin or any facial expression at all (Mochi laughing progressively louder, until I had to hit him a few times). I was completely certain Sawamura would eventually give up his little game before pouncing on me after I finished eating.

He didn’t.

He paid me absolutely no attention at all.

One could say he purposely ignored me.

Alternatively, he simply had no interest in me. None whatsoever.

I soon learned it was the latter. From that point forward, I was suddenly, and very openly, shut out of his daily routine. The blatant rejection hurt so much I stopped looking people directly in the face unless completely necessary. The pity was almost worse than the gut-wrenching misery of seeing this Not-Sawamura so far away from me, a boy I didn’t even know—someone who’d never looked at me romantically, someone who’d be extremely difficult to convince to fall for me, someone whose heart was locked in a cage beyond my reach, a lock that required an epic quest for a magical key. He wasn’t mine anymore; a part of me died inside when I realized that. No, that’s a lie. Everything I thought of as capable of love died when I realized he didn’t want me at all (if he’d ever been mine).

I think Okumura laughs a little when he hears me cry at night.

So I’ve gradually realised Sawamura now belongs to someone else, possibly the person who’d given him that ring he threw away in a fit that edged on hysterics. And that person doesn’t return his feelings—good for me, bad for Sawamura. I have an inkling of who it could be, but it’s so far fetched a theory everyone would laugh at me for even considering it.

The worst part of it is that during the past few days he seemed to pick up on my feelings for him, and was both amused and uncertain. Why he thinks it's funny, I have no clue. Is it such a strange idea for him, to flirt with his senpai? What's all that shōjo manga good for if not to prepare him for the moment someone like me can sweep him off his stubborn feet? If I needed proof that the boy I once knew had changed irrevocably, today I received it.

Because the Sawamura I fell in love with wouldn't have given anyone the confession letter I received today.

He'd come up to the group of third years I was talking with at lunch, looking as shy and cute as I'd dreamed of a few months ago. We were sitting outside, trying to relax a little in the sun. All conversation stopped abruptly as he crouched down and leaned in quite close to my face, the way I'd done the day of that flirtation tantrum disaster. He whispered, "Miyuki Kazuya, you're my favorite senpai." He licked his lips a little, and eyed my own, as if he might want to taste me. Where had he learned this? When had he received an advanced degree in Pitcher Ecchi? The words were making me melt slowly. I was literally sinking under his gaze, I couldn't help it. He was too strong, he had become a lion, I the lamb. At such a short range I could clearly see the difference between the former sweet boy and this young man with his own hidden fears and dark desires. Moreover, there was an odd look in his eye I'd never noticed before, a gleam of intelligence that made me both anxious and turned on. I fought off the need to kiss him there, right in front of everyone. I was too happy, much too happy, to see this little scene play out as I had hoped it would.

But something was off. He was too good at this, completely fearless as he took my right hand, placed a small white envelope beneath my palm. He sat back, brushed a stray hair off my face and gave me a light peck on the cheek before he jumped up nimbly and strutted off like a little wildcat. A cat, I thought in a daze. When had he become a cat, and not a puppy? I didn't want to show anyone the card, I'd save it for later, but Mochi stole it before I had a chance to realize it was gone.

He tore the envelope open with a crow of delight, read the contents before anyone else had a chance to see inside. I tried to grab it back from him but the look of warning in my friend's eyes stopped me. "Miyuki..." I knew it was a bad sign when he didn't make a show of handing the card around to everyone in our group.

My stomach felt a little queasy as he replaced the card in the envelope carefully and gave it back to me without looking me in the eyes.

I left my food on the ground and walked a good distance away, then opened my confession letter up. This is what I found:

 

It was printed out on good cardstock, too. Very high quality. I bet he'd even put some thought into writing it.

He was mocking me.

Did he really not understand how much I needed him? Was he really being deliberately cruel? Or was he that stupid, to not see that I wanted to be more than a boyfriend to him? That I wanted something that would last beyond high school, beyond college?

I wanted to fly away. Away from Seidō, away from Japan, far off into outer space so no one would see my frozen tears.

* * *

**Chapter 9 General Notes**

The song release dates don’t coincide perfectly with the timeline in this fic.

\---

*The Mexíca, or Aztec people, played a blood-encrusted game called _ullamaliztli_ with a 9 lb rubber ball that could never fall to the ground and had to get through a stone hoop. It was bloody because the ball couldn’t just be bounced on the court or land in the outfield; bodies had to hit each other instead of bats. See http://www.aztec-history.com/aztec-ball-game.html

Lol my ancestors were badass.

 ---

[As you know, Tōkyō is a massive city inside the east part of the Kantō Region of Japan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kant%C5%8D_region). Yuji's Terajima's Daiya no A plot revolves around Western Tōkyō high school baseball team rivalries and revenge plots that usually fail but are always fun to read/watch. Seidō itself is in Kokubunji; their arch rival Inajitsu (Inashiro Jitsugyo) is a Hochiōji team. Last is Ichidai (Ichikawa Daigaku Daisan Kōtō Kōkō), lately bumped unceremoniously off their throne by the Suginami dark horse Yakushi High.

Tōkyō is the way Tokyo is spelled in romaji. I'm trying to be consistent but it's not a big priority atm. Case in point, would you write "omuraisu" or "omu rice"? Or omelet rice? Just sayin. I've no idea myself.

\---

My kurobas/daiya headcanon is that everyone should know at least a couple words in Mandarin, Korean, and English. Curse words are easiest to learn I think because they're fun and very useful (if only internally).

\---

Learn more about delicate virgay flowers at http://www.homostrology.com/love/virgo_love.php

Their chart lists the following:

      * Perfect Partners: Taurus, Capricorn
      * Nearly Perfect Partners: Cancer, Scorpio
      * Like Minded Souls: Virgo
      * Opposites You're Attracted To: Aries, Aquarius
      * Learn From Your Differences: Leo, Libra
      * Not Your Destiny: Gemini, Sagittarius
      * Astrological Hell: Pisces



\---

There are 18.39 metres between catcher and pitcher or 60 feet 6 inches.

\---

Fun fact: Daiya no A tournament numbering is not the same as in real life. In the second volume, Kōshien (national summer tournament) is listed as 89th. In 2015 the tournaments were

      * Selection tournament - 87th
      * Spring Kantō Tournament- 67th
      * (Summer) Kōshien - 97th
      * Fall Kantō Tournament - 68th
      * Meiji Jingu - 46th.



Other real life references for insane Japanese highschool baseball fans and those interested in seeing what random stuff I put here

IRL [Complete High School Tournament Data and Schedule](http://www.hb-nippon.com/game/) - in Japanese

For the upcoming part of this fic, since these Ch 7-11ish journals are circa May 2015:

67th Senbatsu of 2015-- [Kantō Region Specifics](http://www.hb-nippon.com/game/992015005)

**All About Senbatsu!!**

LMFAO no seriously here’s some info for those who need a primer (me), taken straight from Wikipedia: 

 "The National High School Baseball Invitational Tournament (選抜高等学校野球大会 senbatsu kōtō gakkō yakyū taikai) of Japan, commonly known as 'Spring Kōshien' (春の甲子園 haru no kōshien) or 'Senbatsu' (センバツ), is an annual high school baseball tournament. The tournament, organized by the Japan High School Baseball Federation and Mainichi Shimbun, takes place each year in March at Hanshin Koshien Stadium in the Koshien district of Nishinomiya City, Hyōgo, Japan.

 

 

> Teams qualify for the tournament by participating in the regional fall tournaments held throughout the country. While finishing in the top teams generally guarantees an invitation, it is up to the Japan High School Baseball Federation to determine invitees. For instance, in the 2008 Fall Tournament in the Tōhoku region, Ichinoseki Gakuin was the runner-up. However, they were passed over for 3rd place Hanamaki Higashi for the 2009 invitation tournament.
> 
> Of the 32 bids, 26 are automatically awarded as follows to the following regions:
> 
>   * Hokkaido - 1
>   * Tōhoku - 2
>   * Kantō - 4
>   * Tokyo - 1
>   * Tōkai - 2
>   * Hokushin'etsu - 2
>   * Kinki - 6
>   * Chūgoku - 2
>   * Shikoku - 2
>   * Kyushu + Okinawa - 4
> 

> 
> In addition, one additional bid is awarded to a team in the Kanto/Tokyo region, and another to a team in the Chugoku/Shikoku region. The region of the winning team in the Meiji Jingu Fall Tournament (which consists of all fall regional champions) also receives a bid.
> 
> The final 3 bids are what are considered '21st Century Teams'. 21st century teams are a way to give teams who either may not get close to qualifying or who have served as a model school in some way a chance to compete. A team from each prefecture is nominated around November–December. The teams must have advanced to the round of 16 play, but not gotten past the quarterfinals of their prefecture's tournament. Then each region nominates one of those nominees to the selection committee by December 15. Finally, the committee selects the three 21st century teams. [sic]"

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Chapter 9 Glossary**
> 
> bakeneko (化け猫) is a monster cat from Japanese mythology associated with magical powers; a cat yōkai similar to a kitsune/fox or tanuki, the larger group of yōkai that includes nekomata; something like a cat demon that ranks higher than a nekomata; Imayoshi.
> 
> kabuki (歌舞伎) is a traditional Japanese theatrical art that includes dance and drama.
> 
> kihada (きはだ or 黄肌) is yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares) - usually written in kana
> 
> neko (ねこ or 猫) can mean several things including a clay bed-warmer, geisha, domestic cat and the “bottom” in a homosexual relationship. Neko used for gay guys is written in kana. I used the last two.
> 
> nekomata (ねこまた or 猫又; meaning ‘forked cat’) is the name of a fictitious being from Japanese mythology; a lower form of a bakeneko; Hanamiya Makoto.
> 
> toro (とろ) is a fatty cut, like the belly part of a tuna. v tasty. I’m hungry now.


	10. baka of the year

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yes. I wrote it. I thot it would be read by sensei only and that he would keep it confidential OMFG WTF IS WRONG WIT U SENSEI ┻━┻ ヘ╰( •̀ε•́ ╰)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait! Work was pretty stressful for a while, but the summer rush is over and now I can relax some. Hope you enjoy this.  
> I took some liberties with Facebook. How much of a kpopper are you? Prove it to me by naming the singers I spoofed. No ulzzang or kpop singers were harmed in the production of this chapter.  
> Can you guess who my favorite character is in this fandom? Answer is in the end notes.
> 
> Oh wait I almost forgot, there's a teensy bit of noncon/dubcon with nothing graphic. Don't worry, everything is fine in the end but I don't want you to freak out with this cheesy romance suddenly turning abusive, because it's not. This is intended as a highly fluffy piece I assure you!

* * *

anno Eijun, day 3

I’m just a boy, not a hero for godssake.

So…this is awkward. Even in my damn diary it’s fucking awkward! I mean, look at me! Cursing and everything! What is wrong with me???? Sigh. Before I get overexcited again let me explain from the beginning, why I’m upset, and why this day will go down in my own personal history as the worst ever.

Does it count as cheating when you’re unaware that your lover is possessed by another? What is real anymore? Is the guy sitting next to you really the person you think he is? Did you ever know him in the first place?

I was lonely. He seemed real—but the dreams did, as well. Don’t hate me; I have enough guilt for the two of us.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to the idiotic poetry homework. If only we’d been assigned an English haiku, a traditional one with kigo…It was my fault for picking a love poem, for using sex references, especially the kind that make you think the author has actually had sex. Because I’m not supposed to have had sex, and I really haven’t, technically. In fact, I doubt very many boys in my club have had sex no matter what their age is. I’m 16 but it’s not like I’m living in a yaoi manga or anything.

You’d think having written commentary like that would get me a scolding from sensei, maybe discipline of some sort. 

Nope.

Please prepare a door to run through after you read this, in case you’re easily embarrassed on the behalf of others. Imagine me, standing in front of the classroom, face no doubt red in the extreme and of course sweating like a pig, as my sensei reads all of the following: 

“‘eulogy for a dream’ is an impressive post-modern work that serves as an original work of fiction rather than objective, mechanistic literary critique. The most impressive feature of Sawamura-kun’s commentary is that he created his own alternate universe, in which cummings’ work served as a framework for understanding his own fictional romance. Although he didn’t follow the assignment, Sawamura-kun revealed what kind of synergistic magic is possible when a young person applies poetic insight into their everyday lives. He was also able to unveil surprising elements of his innermost self. The most thought-provoking component of this work is Sawamura-kun’s keen ability to match cummings’ conflicted feelings regarding love, desire, and loss. His creativity shone clearly throughout this assignment and that alone deserves recognition on a national level.”

Yup. He read that, something he sent to the judges of a regional Kantō high school literary criticism contest. Guess what? I haven’t won any awards for pitching lately but I did get one for that shitty bracketnikki.

I couldn’t help but close my eyes, because every single one of my classmates’ eyes were as round and large as baseballs. They each held copies of my poem commentary in their hands. I wanted to rip all the papers to shreds—every last one, I would leave no evidence—and throw it in a bonfire. Problem was, every other high school kid in Tōkyō was probably looking at the same paper. I couldn’t exactly burn down the whole city. I wondered idly if anyone had Tweeted about it yet. Because it would happen. I would be the laughingstock of the school. No…maybe even of Japan itself? From what sensei told me, this was a high literary honor, and no one from Seidō had ever won before.

When sensei finished reading the quote in praise of my homework, I opened my eyes and deliberately avoided making eye contact with anyone as I waited for him to stop rambling about my (completely unintended) cleverness. My ears perked up at the “You may be seated now, Sawamura-kun,” and I almost ran back to my desk. The best I could do was stumble in a completely un-Sakamoto* fashion, though, legs now wobbly from pure humiliation.

Kanemaru, of course, was in my class. We have every subject together—the tortuous nature of Japanese high school education being to keep kids in one class and bring the teachers to us. While it means we don’t have to run around between classes, it also forces me to sit with the same people day in and day out regardless of my feelings. And believe me, I have plenty of those. It took everything I had, more concentration than what I use in a pitch against Raichi, to not look at him as I sat down (a boy who perversely sits next to me every day). I hid my face against the desk, covering my head with my hands. I wanted to die—not an exaggeration. I was really thinking about diving off the rooftop. I didn’t listen to anything anyone said for the rest of the class.

I apparently fell asleep because I quite suddenly found myself hovering above a classroom that looked much like my own, complete with the same sensei, classmates, and unrequited crush. I hesitated, then looked for a physical Eijun. I was sitting in the same position I last remember being, head covered and body hunched over my desk. Was it just me or was I particularly unattractive today? From an objective point of view, I resembled a lumpy, overgrown hedgehog in my slouched position with my clothes a bit wrinkled and hair sticking out between my fingers. The others had stopped staring at me and moved on to a discussion of a complicated story about a man meeting himself in different places and points in his life**. In the back of my mind, I thought it sounded kind of interesting and wished I was awake to hear more. Instead, I felt a little tug towards Kanemaru, who was staring out the window. I found myself drawn to him; I could stare at him all I wanted now. I sort of circled down to him slowly, the way a bird of prey searches for its food. Eventually my spirit (for that’s what I imagined myself to be) sat on the windowsill and tried to block Kanemaru’s vision.

Abruptly he looked up at me, and the color of his irises had shifted imperceptibly. His pupils seemed narrower, as well. Almost like he was a different species.

I realized belatedly that no one else had shown any interest in me or noticed a separation between my spirit and body. I stared at him, uncertain what to do next.

“Quite a talented pair you are,” he muttered cryptically, and snapped his fingers in front of my nose.

I jerked back just in time to avoid getting flicked. He was laughing, but not in a way I can ever recall either Kanemaru laughing (the dream or real versions). This was almost a third person entirely. His laugh held a strange combination of disdain, bitterness, and a hint of affection (the last most disturbing of all). “You little blind fool, how can you dream walk but not see through me?”

Faster than a cobra strike, he roughly yanked me forward, grabbing my face with his hands and kissing me hungrily. I was too shocked to resist at first. I should have been happy, but his touch felt wrong somehow, like it was making me dirty, but not in a good way. When he tried to force his tongue in my mouth I pushed him away automatically, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. My mouth was assaulted by an insistent, almost sinuous tongue that felt slightly alien and nothing like my Shinji’s tongue. Who was this person? And where was the real Shinji?

Then the oddest thing happened. My vision swam, running in bleeding lines of black, circling and covering everything until it seemed like I was watching a black whirlpool in constant motion. It made me nauseated and I wanted to close my eyes but found them captivated by the vision. That went on for only a moment or two and then we were lying on my bed. He was tearing off my clothes and no matter what I did, I couldn’t get away from him. Finally he managed to restrain me by tying my wrists and ankles to the bedposts with rope that had appeared out of nowhere. I was screaming my head off, but no one seemed to care or at least no one was around to listen, because nothing came of all the racket I made.

He was silent as the grave while I screamed, foreign eyes in a familiar body laughing at my weakness and fear. They were now a completely different color, a strange green I’d never seen in my entire life. The pupils shifted to a narrow line like a cat's, which should have been shocking to me but by then my sense of reasoning was way off. They had hypnotised me, the way a cobra does. I was able to calm myself down just by concentrating on the stark differences between the real Shinjis I knew—those from my first daydream and real life—and this alien Kanemaru. Just as I became calm, he began to kiss and lick his way teasingly down the side of my neck towards my groin. I assure you I was in no way turned on. I was so frightened I screamed like a little girl, while I tugged and jerked at my bonds, hard enough to feel my skin rub raw. He made a motion to touch my lifeless dick and just before his tongue could make contact, my body disappeared. I had finally remembered it was a dream. Maniacal laughter followed me as I flew out of the room, spirit passing easily through the window pane.

Some primary, basic instinct drew me across the city like a lightening bolt to a flagpole. In a few heartbeats I found myself standing in an indoor basketball court. I glanced around in confusion. My heart said I was in the right place, but all I could see were a bunch of tall boys in black uniforms, practicing side to side shuffling drills. For some reason they seemed vaguely familiar.

I heard a strange voice speak softly behind me.

“Eijun.”

Immobilized by a tidal wave of emotions, I was so full of fear, anger, and longing at the sound that my heart nearly exploded. 

“Eijun…” the voice was less certain now, almost pleading.

I finally spun around and flung myself at an apparition of the boy I hated and never stopped loving. _“WHAT THE FUCK, YOU IDIOT!”_ I screamed. I struggled to squeeze him in a tight hug but he sniffed and flung me off.

“You smell like Hanamiya, you cheating kusoyarō,” he hissed, and punched me right in the face, hard enough to make me reel backwards. I didn’t feel anything—it was a dream, after all, which I was acutely aware of after traveling through a glass window and building walls.

I was so confused, I had no idea what he was saying. “Who? What are you talking about?” I grunted as I fell on my ass. There wasn’t any sensation, but my body had expected it would hurt and that made me prepare for the worst.

He stood above me and kicked my feet lightly. “Oi, don’t tell me you didn’t figure it out when my body didn’t try to jump your bones after that poem went viral.”

_Viral? It already went viral? Shit!_

I took my mind off my real life problems by concentrating on his beautiful face, the one that looked at me with love even though he was upset. Right now he looked incensed and bitter—he was always sexy when he was angry but this time there was also hurt, and maybe even sinister intent.

I blinked in confusion. “Your body?”

He flung up his hands, as if regretting the day he met me, and stalked over to the bleachers above where the team’s manager sat taking notes. I dimly recall her face from Dream-Seidō. Mimi? Momo? Momoi…Momoi Satsuki? Was this really the Vorpal Swords? 

I was brought back to the present as Shinji yelled, “Come up here, baka. Tell me why you smell like Hanamiya’s hands have been all over you.”

I jumped at the sound. Looking at this boy with form but no substance, obviously invisible to everyone else, was oddly reassuring. Between the two Shinji in this dream, the physical (alien) and insubstantial (angel, spirit, or figment of my imagination), I’d pick this one any day. Instantly I was sitting next to him, hands clutched in his. I concentrated on the novelty of moving from point to point without traveling through space as a way to avoid thinking about how much I’d fucked up. I couldn’t look him in the eye. I’d cheated on him.

“You,” I faltered. This person, with a voice at once kind, jealous, furious and desperately sad, was not the person I had woken up to after Dream-Seidō. “That person,” I amended, “that person forced me…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. It made me want to cry, sob like a little baby, and I refused to do that in front of him. 

I could feel his spirit body light up with a deathly black aura that put to shame anything I’d seen before—it was on an entirely different level than Furuya, a chaste and sweet boy at the core. No, this fire was born of pure, unadulterated hatred and maybe a touch of insanity.

I waved my free hand in his face. “Earth to Shinji.” He shook his head and stared back at me, seemingly bewildered. “Eijun,” he whispered, sounding lost. I hugged him tightly so that he could tell I was real, even if we were only the shades of bodies that slept elsewhere.

“I missed you so fucking much,” I growled into his neck. I raised my head and swiped at the tears now streaming freely down my cheeks. “What the fuck is up with your dual personality?” _And why can't I feel things in this dream like in a normal one? In a normal dream I would have enjoyed the feeling of touching you. Why does this seem almost like a washed out illusion of a dream, or a dream within a dream?_

My thoughts were interrupted as he replied, “Ah…ummm…” It was Shinji’s turn to be embarrassed. I’d rarely seen him so cute before, I wish I had my phone to take a picture but of course it was a stupid dream. “Actually, the person you see when you’re awake, even though he looks like me, he’s not. His name is Hanamiya Makoto and he’s a nekomata, an alien from another universe.”

“Wait, is he a nekomata or an alien?” I asked, confused as hell.

“Both. That’s what nekomata are. They’re alien cats. People used to think of them as demons because they didn’t have the scientific capability of understanding the multiverse and the possibility that aliens can live alongside and even inside humans without us ever being aware.” Shinji squeezed me a little closer as he wrapped his arm around my shoulders. The hug was ghostly, and held a fraction of the sensation I knew was possible in real life, but despite this it made my heart warm. Gradually, I stopped sniffling and my tears stopped. “You mean this guy Han-whatever is actually inside your body, and you’re somewhere else?” I was even more confused now. Who was this alien and why was he trying to ruin my life? And how could I get my boyfriend back safely?

“ _Hanamiya_ is an evil, sadistic bastard currently occupying my body while my soul is out playing matchmaker.” He squeezed my hands and began to kiss me lightly all over my face and neck, the frustration in his voice at odds with the softness of his lips on my skin. “The reasons are really complicated, and you’ll be told about it soon enough. You should enjoy this time of innocence while you still can.”

“Innocence?” I sputtered. I’d had plenty of sex (okay, it was a dream but whatever) so didn’t that mean I wasn’t innocent?

He stopped kissing me briefly and cradled my face in his hands, tilting my head up to force me to look at him. “Your mind is your own. You make your own decisions. Your body obeys your commands alone. That, to me, is innocence and purity at its best.”

I looked up at him and saw that even the Shinji I’d known in Dream-Seidō had changed drastically. This boy was much more somber than I remembered, with an air of desolation around him that made me want to personally torture an alien called Hanamiya Makoto. 

He must have seen something of my thoughts in my expression because he frowned and said, “It’s still my body though, and whatever happens to it will affect the real me. So don’t go avenging me or anything. I chose to do this of my own free will. You’ll understand when you meet him.”

Now this was a truly terrifying development “What? Who?” Would I be getting my own alien? Would I too be possessed? 

“You’ll recognize him when you see him. Not that many guys can walk around with eyes closed but see more than anyone else.”

I scoured my memory of Dream- and Real-Seidō. “You gotta be shittin’ me.”

“No, I’m not. Why would I be shittin’ you in your dream, baka?”

“Well, it’s just that…did it have to be Imayoshi Shōichi?” Because that was the only slightly sinister, squinty-eyed person I knew besides Onii-san, and Onii-san was out of the question because a baseball player from Seidō being an alien was just too much for my limited imagination.

“Apparently he and Hanamiya are the only ones in the area—so it’s either him or Hanamiya, and I threatened to kill myself if they made you work with that bastard.”

Thinking back on how Hanamiya-inside-Kanemaru had molested me in my dream, I was now eternally grateful that Shinji had intervened on my behalf. “You’re the best boyfriend in the universe.”

“We’re still going out?” He said this so hopefully it made me want to cry again. And slap him a little for good measure.

“Of course! We never stopped, right?” Then I remembered how much of a drama queen I’d been and turned away, adding, “At least that was my understanding, until I saw that you weren’t wearing your ring. I thought that meant you didn’t want me anymore, or the whole thing had never happened. So I got rid of mine. Truth is, I have no idea what’s real and what’s a dream, now.” I hid my face in my hands, embarrassed.

After a little pointless struggle, I let him lower my hands and turn my face so that we were looking directly at each other. “I woke up wearing my ring,” he said earnestly, and raised his left hand as proof. There was the golden ring I remembered, lion staring back at me as if in silent support. “If it’s not on my finger when we’re awake, then Hanamiya did something with it. I have no idea what he’s doing with my body. I’m actually trying to hack back in there, to steal a little time away with you, but here you came for me instead.” He smiled, and it was a genuine, real-Shinji smile, the the kind made by the boy I’d fallen in love with when he was over the moon with happiness. “This is a nice surprise. But it doesn’t mean I’ll stop wanting or trying to hack back in my body. I need to play in Koshien with you, right? This job here is gonna take for fuckin-ever, seriously, matchmaking is so difficult you have no clue.”

I laughed at the ridiculous notion of Shinji involved in a real life shōjo. He joined me, and I was struck by the differences between Hanamiya-Kanemaru and the real Shinji. This boy was in some way very much alive and full of desire, a desire bubbling just below the surface. _Is it for me?_ I wondered, leaning away as he advanced with a provocative gleam in his eye. _Is this…excitement just because of me?_ _He’s getting closer every second—as a matter of fact, I think if we were alone and awake he’d be fucking me right now…_ I almost moaned at the idea. It had been much, much too long since I’d tasted him. 

I think he had an inkling of my lewd thoughts because he grinned and kissed me on the lips, the way he used to, all nibbles and sinful licking like I was made of chocolate and not just a plain boy like everyone else thinks I am. 

It seemed like a good idea at the time to whisper, “Shinji, I missed you,” but that was of course when I was still asleep. 

I awoke abruptly to the real person in question shaking my shoulder rather roughly. This person was not, however, the person I had been kissing, so I found myself once again blushing like a shōjo maiden in front of my entire class. Muffled laughter from all sides greeted me. The eyes of the person that had awoken me were laughing, although the rest of him was normal, no sign of a ring to be seen as usual. It’s as if he had no clue at all what was going on in my head. Of course, how could he? Was he really an alien? Or rather, was there something truly wrong with me, that I was half believing in my daydreams?

Later, after class I saw that Twitter and Facebook were, indeed, lit up in flames of gossip over my idiotic bracketnikki. So it seemed the only thing I could do was go for honesty. I’d never been a very good liar.

 

Obviously these people had not thought or heard of others gossiping that I had said, “Shinji I missed you” during class earlier. Otherwise wouldn’t they have more pointed remarks? Or would they even hate me? I had yet to speak to Kanemaru about it, but he seemed to be avoiding or ignoring me, which I was somewhat thankful for. I didn’t know what to say to someone that I was both in love (dream) and hate (reality) with. At least I got a good laugh out of reading Takeru’s comments, though.

 

When I read Miyuki’s response my heart beat a little faster, manga style. _Was he defending me? Could this shit even happen in real life?_ Even after I’d played that terrible prank on him? Now that I replayed the last few days over in my head, I’d been acting a bit strange around Miyuki. Why had I given him a weird confession letter that made a joke about his pubes when he didn’t even have crabs in this universe? Although if he actually did it would be hella funny.

 _Wait. I’m having a Sawamura minute here._  (Things sometimes take me a little longer to figure out so don’t laugh at me.)

**HOLD ALL THE PHONES AT THE PHONE STATION AND WAIT JUST A GODDAMN FUCKING MINUTE.**

Did Miyuki…. _like_ me? Like, for real? And did I…

Did I feel something back for him, like the ghost of a love that happened a lifetime ago? _Was it actually possible I was imagining my love for Kanemaru, when in reality someone else was already in love with me and I with them?_ Was I imagining an obsessive love for Kanemaru because it was easier to love a fantasy third baseman in secret, rather than admit an embarrassing crush on a living, breathing catcher in real life? And maybe I could find happiness with Miyuki if I just let this terrible, miserable and poorly thought out sob story about aliens and alternate universes and a dream dimension go away? Could I possibly just…just let it fizzle out like a can of warm Coke…let it fade away and ignore the haunting whispers of a daymare that refused to leave me alone? I could maybe apologize to Miyuki and see if he was still interested...

_…oh god what am I waiting for? He’s literally every girl and boy’s dream lover, down to the enigmatic chuckle. How could I be so blind to his cuteness before?_

_But will I ever be able to forget Shinji? Should I? Oh what to do…and would Miyuki even consider forgiving such an idiot for that ridiculous (maybe offensive) prank confession?_

My question for you, dear reader: am I actually dating Kanemaru Shinji, if it’s only in my dreams?

* * *

 

 **Captain’s Log** No. 22

 **time.** 05時20分 5:20 am

 **date.** 2015年5月13日(水) 13 May 2015 (Wednesday)

And here I am again, Captain Lovestruck Whinsteine explaining/wondering why I think Sawamura is a (dark) angel fallen from the sky or I’m just plain crazy…

First and foremost, I’m Sawamura’s captain and I generally prefer to catch for him, if only because he listens to what I say where his health is concerned. He learned from my senpai (and my own mistakes) that it’s easy to overtrain and a very bad idea to hide injuries. The same can’t be said for Furuya, however talented he may be. So I can notice very subtle issues in his pitching that might not seem so obvious to others. His emotional wellbeing notwithstanding, I need to know exactly how to use his skills in a game, how I can leverage it over the batter and ump, and thus how to win. Okay, so we pitch together, our battery is in sync, he follows instructions and concentrates with a fierce sense of purpose and determination. Combined with a joy for the game that is unmatched even in baseball anime, under most circumstances he’d be considered good material for ace…if Furuya weren’t in the mix and gunning just as hard for the same position.

(You see, I’m justifying this whining about feelings with complaining/worrying about Sawamura’s baseball abilities. Even I know it’s a stretch, though.)

Because I won’t lie and say that I’m not biased and that I don’t love Sawamura—I do. Even though he doesn’t return my feelings. I probably couldn’t stop even if I wanted to (I don’t) and therefore, I do want him to be the ace, and yes, I’ll do just about anything to get him there. His raw energy, tenacious willpower, uncommon windup, late release and follow through, growing arsenal of pitches and the fact that he’s a southpaw all contribute to weapons I can hone and wield in the battle to get him on top. [An aside: I don’t really imagine him being a top in bed, but I’ll be lucky to get in any bed with him at this point so beggars can’t be choosers]. All that being said, I’ll admit that the most disturbing difference I’ve seen in my pitcher is that around the same time he stopped loving me (admitting defeat is hard but necessary), he changed as a baseball player, in basically all aspects of the game—pitching, fielding, general composure. 

Example number one: His fastball has made a vast improvement over the course of only a few weeks. Speeds that are common for Furuya are now not so much of a pipe dream. Somehow, he’s picked up the nuances of finger placement on the ball in addition to control that his rival has always struggled with, something it takes people years of practice and patience to acquire. How did he hide all this talent from me? Every time he pitches, I wonder if this is really the same person I fell in love with and if he hasn’t been holding back the entire time. If so, why, and does it have anything to do with our personal relationship?

Example number two: His batting skills have improved. The other day in a practice game against Akikawa Academy, he actually got on base with a hit off Yō Shunshin’s perfectly executed cutter. **HOW**. I thought I had fallen asleep and was dreaming, the hit was that solid.

Example number three: His self confidence has increased so much he seems more like a third year than a second, and almost exudes charisma, a very ace-like quality. Problem is, I’m not the only one that’s noticed this. Everyone suddenly has the hots for Sawamura-kun, and are constantly staring at him in awe and confusion, as if he’s a solar eclipse on what should be a brilliantly bright and sunny day (he’s oblivious, as usual). This applies to both romance and baseball, which if you think about it are about one and the same. I’ve just never really known what it’s like to be on such a bad losing streak.

…So going back to when I first noticed things had changed…On and off the field he’d been a little quieter, seemed troubled about something, and at first I thought he really had it bad for me, or was worried about an upcoming game. That’s when people began to look at him in ways I’d never thought possible and acted differently when he was around. I think most were concerned, but others troubled me. What got me pissed off was that I had no way of discussing it with others (still don’t), since I had no proof and my questions would be pretty inappropriate for a captain and friend to make. In terms of pure baseball, a few times I caught Ochiai giving Sawamura considering looks, a bit different than before the “change.” His little plan to subvert Sawamura’s growth intensified, becoming so obvious that everyone could tell what he was up to (except my pitcher, of course). 

Stranger still, I found four new love rivals in my team alone; the entire female student body now constituting his female fan club. What the hell was with these people? Since when did Furuya show interest in anyone without pink hair? And why had he stopped begging me to catch for him, in favor of openly ogling my favorite battery partner’s ass (I have to admit the latter might have been inevitable)? Mochi’s wrestling began to follow a pattern of “accidentally” touching certain areas instead of the normal casual, innocent display of bromance. He even sent me irritated glances when I flirted with Sawamura, when _everyone knew that we were meant to be together_ (I mean, seriously, a cute battery between a tsundere and a sunshine child is just a general expectation of starcrossed love if there ever was one). God, it was so confusing. 

I felt like the rug had been pulled out from under my feet a third time when I saw **MY SOUTHPAW** being manhandled by **MY KŌHAI** in the bullpen. **WHAT. THE. FLYING. FUCK.** That is **MY PITCHER** and I’m not giving him to some lame (obviously dyed) blond dimwit John Wayne wannabe that fancies himself a catcher prodigy. What was with that hide-and-seek game they played the other day? I can’t believe Sawamura let Okumura **TOUCH HIM**! I am so going to kill that little thief if I so much as see a single deliberate mistake during practice. Because everyone knows making mistakes is the way to win my boy’s heart— something about that “oh I’ll let you cry on my sexy muscular-but-not-too-built shoulder because everyone makes mistakes blah blah blah” is what he secretly longs for. Hah. Let Okumura try. I won’t go down without a fight!

Last but not least, that damn Kanemaru, what’s he up to? It took me a while (too long) to figure out that Sawamura is actually pining over the other blond little shit. What exactly can anyone see in him? He isn’t that talented, took forever to make first string, is much less of a tsundere than me and obviously straight. Any gay kid would be shut down immediately for confessing to him. But recently that changed into something sort of perverse and inexplicable. If this new Kanemaru received a gay boy’s confession he’d be different than me—he’d string the poor wretch along for years until kicking him to the curb with a wife. The shittiest thing about Kanemaru is that he knows my pitcher is in love ( **DAMN THAT BOY** ) with him but chooses to cruelly ignore him. Yes, I can admit that Sawamura has feelings for someone else but that doesn’t mean I can like it or approve of my rival treating my crush with such disdain. What really gives me the shivers though is that sometimes Kanemaru _looks_ at me as though he knows what I’m thinking, smirks and struts around like he’s taking his sweet time making Sawamura suffer until he’ll strike without warning. A cobra. That’s what I think of when I look at the kid now, whereas before the “change” he also seemed like a normal, innocent guy. Before I’d pity the fool for even imagining himself next to what in all rights should belong to me. Now I think that he’s the one that will get the kiss I’ve been patiently waiting for, the one I should have taken when I had the chance, the one I’m longing for every time I see Sawamura. 

I can’t get Sawamura’s love without trying harder than I ever have for anything I’ve ever attempted. So competitive baseball is hard. Love is actually a lot harder. You get a break from practice for eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom and that time when you’re supposed to be studying but end up sleeping through or planning for the next game. But I can’t actually stop loving someone, and I have to take every single opportunity I have with Sawamura to make him mine again. What haunts me at night, after every technical aspect of our next game runs in a loop twice over, is the question of whether he was ever mine to begin with. Was he blushing about someone else? Was he laughing at me, the way I now see him secretly giggle when he thinks I’m not within hearing range? What if he was always like this, and I dreamed the whole “Sawamura loves me and I’m secretly crazy about him” fantasy up? I’m just completely confused with the boy on all fronts (Even with the embarrassingly obvious Hands Off-Do Not Touch message he gave me yesterday. Yes, I’m that persistent and foolish). 

Aside from the shōnen ai game we’re all playing, Kataoka-kantoku and I have noticed something strange in Sawamura’s pitching form lately. When I ask for a pitch, he hesitates for about a millisecond before settling into his standard full windup, as if he’s actually considering working on pitching from the stretch. In a game, pitchers mix up their pitching position based on whether there are baserunners, but in practice we’ve had him stick to the full windup for a reason. He’s inexperienced and gets easily confused. That is, he used to be. At this point I have no clue about his experience and talent because he is literally a different person or I am certifiably insane. What else is he hiding? If he had an injury I would have seen signs by now.

Not only that, but after he pitches one time, he shakes his head a little in a way I’ve never seen before, rotates his hips and puts his weight on the opposite foot before catching himself with wide eyes. He then very carefully rotates back into the correct stance; it takes visible effort to remain in a position he’s used for much of the time I’ve played with him. There’s no way he could be trying to pitch from the right side. He’s a southpaw, and southpaws pitch left, it’s practically a cardinal rule of baseball. I mean, technically they can try to pitch right but it comes out awkward and slow because it’s an unnatural way for their body to work. When this happens, from a distance I can see him tense up and I have to stand up and go calm him down a bit every so often. Ochiai, Oota, Takashima, Kataoka and even Nabe have all noticed this and expressed concern. Of course little Nabe would notice something like that—the boy has exceptional observational skills (if only he could be like Sawamura…).

Will someone please get me a manual on this boy? Because every time I think I’ve pinned him down (Jesus, I only wish! God I’m such a lech), he slides out from under my reach and I have to run after him, throat hoarse from screaming and heart about to burst. Why did it have to be him? And why does it have to get worse every time I see him look at someone else? Is there any way he can be mine, whether it’s again, for the first time, or (hopefully) forever? If I become a girl at some point during this diary please don’t be surprised. Because lately I’ve been feeling way more emotional than any male ought to be.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 10 Glossary & Notes  
> A _haiku_ (俳句) is a form of traditional Japanese poetry. The more old fashioned haiku celebrate nature, using seasonal reference words called _kigo_ (季語).  
>  *As in the main character from _Sakamoto, Desu Ga?_ , a manga and anime starring a high school boy named Sakamoto, who is coolness and elegance personified. And totally gay, IMHO (I ship Acchan x Sakamoto). |´∀｀●) An excellent crossover in the making…  
> **10 points and a story request to the first person who can pinpoint the Borges fic this refers to.  
> Did you notice Sawamura’s kaomoji throws tables….to the left? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) LMFAO #ihavenoregrets  
> My favorite Daiya character is.......Takeru Asō!


End file.
